Mike Winn is a co-founder and the CEO of DroneDeploy. The company was founded in 2013, originally to combat poaching. DroneDeploy is now a leading cloud software platform for commercial drones. Industry sectors they serve include agriculture, construction, mining, energy, forestry, and others. DroneDeploy customers get professional-grade imagery and analysis, 3D modeling, and more. Customers have mapped and analyzed over 100 million acres in over 180 countries.
Mike explains how drones have progressed from a novelty to an integral part of many business operations. Drones are increasingly becoming the future of work as they help industrial professionals remotely work, collaborate, and improve the safety of their job sites.
We talk about outsourcing drone operations versus using internal resources, and how they have become a simple to use tool that doesn’t require a specialist. Mike talks about the ease of data capture and analysis, and how the free Flight app can be used for flight planning and data collection that uploads images to an analytical engine for translation into a 3D model and map.
DroneDeploy finds that even though they support many different industries, a surprising amount of the technology is horizontal (cross-industry) rather than industry-specific.
DroneDeploy also operates DroneDeploy.org where they give free or subsidized licenses to organizations using drones for good.
Facebook cancels the high altitude, solar powered Aquila project. Matternet and DroneDeploy attract VC capital, Amazon patents drone hacking defense, lawmakers seek to make wildfire overflights a felony, China develops surveillance drones that look like birds, and Transcend Air proposes a VTOL transportation service.
Facebook has shut down their Aquila project. The high altitude, solar-powered drones (or “atmospheric satellites”) were to provide Internet access to areas that lack connectivity. Facebook said other companies with more experience and resources were working on this problem. Two Aquila test flights were conducted – the first resulted in a structural failure that caused a hard landing and the second didn’t meet Facebook’s goals.
Matternet has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Boeing Horizon X Ventures. Matternet founder and CEO Andreas Raptopoulos said, “As we expand Matternet’s U.S. and global operations, we will work with Boeing to make next-generation aerial logistics networks a reality and transform our everyday lives.” Investments also came from Swiss Post, the Sony Innovation Fund, and Levitate Capital. Matternet works with Mercedes-Benz Vans in its drone integration program, and it also participates in two projects under the FAA’s UAS Integration Pilot Program.
DroneDeploy is the large cloud-based drone data platform with 30,000 users having mapped 30 million acres in 180 countries on 400,000 job sites. The funding round is led by the Invenergy Future Fund and backed by Australian VC AirTree with investors Scale Venture Partners, Uncork Capital, Emergence Capital, and AngelPad.
Yet another Amazon drone patent! Patent number 10007265 is titled “Hostile takeover avoidance of unmanned vehicles” and attempts to counter attackers who would steal the drones or their packages or even to take out the drones by hacking the communications signals. The patent proposes a “heartbeat” signal between the UAV and controller in normal “mission mode.” If the signal is lost, the UAV is assumed compromised and it shifts to “safety mode.” According to the patent, “In the safety mode, the UAV performs one or more pre-programmed actions designed to re-establish communication with the controller, regain control over the UAV in the event of a hostile takeover, and/or land the UAV at a safe location.”
U.S. Senator Cory Gardner (R-Colorado), Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colorado), and Rep. Scott Tipton (R-Cortez) introduced S.3132, the Securing Airspace For Emergency Responders Act. Under this bill, flying an unauthorized drone over a wildfire could land you a fine, and maybe a year in jail.
China has been testing drones that look and fly like birds. The “robo-doves” have been flown in “at least five provinces by some 30 government and military agencies in the country.” Reportedly, they have gone undetected in these tests by people and other birds. The wings flap, the drones can soar and dive like a bird, and they are very quiet. The perfect surveillance device.
A vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft providing door-to-door service was announced by Transcend Air Corporation. The tilt-wing Vy 400 six-seat aircraft would utilize VTOL-ready landing pads, 405 miles per hour, and have a range of 450 miles. Transcend plans to launch commuter airline service in early 2024.
RoboRod LLC has developed a fishing rod with a “drone.” Chief development officer Paul Leslie calls it, “probably the biggest development in the fishing rod since the addition of the reel.” If you can’t cast where you want, RoboRod’s “drone” will swim your line to that perfect spot, and drop your bait on command, to the desired depth.
A UAS for Venus from Black Swift Technologies, DJI building a new headquarters complex, MIT develops the Navion chip, DroneDeploy spells out commercial drone predictions for 2018 and beyond, and LiquidPiston is developing a rotary drone engine.
Black Swift Technologies awarded contract to develop UAS for atmospheric observations of Venus. Image courtesy Black Swift Technologies.
Black Swift Technologies announced it has been awarded a NASA contract to perform upper atmospheric observations of the planet Venus. They will develop an unmanned aircraft system based on the concept of dynamic soaring. Jack Elston, CEO of Black Swift Technologies said, “While there have been a variety of systems proposed for upper atmospheric observations of Venus, the planet’s high wind speeds pose a significant design challenge. Our solution will be designed to not only survive in the harsh wind environment, but also simultaneously perform targeted sampling of the atmosphere while continuously extracting energy, even on the dark side of the planet.”
DJI is constructing new company headquarters in China. The 1.7 million square foot complex includes twin towers connected with a sky bridge. This sky bridge includes a giant indoor space for demonstrating and testing drones.
A team at MIT has developed a custom chip called Navion that is smaller, has lower power consumption, and increased processing speed. Applications for Navion include tiny “nanodrones.” The chip can process real-time camera images up to 171 frames per second as well as inertial measurements. Researchers say the chip can help vehicles navigate, “particularly in remote or inaccessible places where global positioning satellite data is unavailable.”
Drone data company DroneDeploy has eight predictions for the commercial drone industry in 2018. These are continued consumerization of drone hardware, more outside players entering the Industry, in-house drone programs replacing service providers, deployments of large-scale fleets, a new era of automation, acquisition of large data sets, use of machine learning and artificial intelligence, and real-time data collection and analysis.
LiquidPiston Inc. is developing the X4 engine that offers the possibility of quieter drones, greater flight time, and reduced thermal signature. With some similarity to the Wankel engine, the X4 has an oval rotor inside a triangular chamber. DARPA is interested in the X4 enough to invest $2.5 million in LiquidPiston to continue research and development of the engine.
