UAS News Podcast — 2014-10-30
Transcript
Hello everyone and welcome to the next installment of the UAS News Podcast Series where we interview newsmakers and discuss the news and applications relevant to the global unmanned technologies community. I'm your program host and let's say hello and welcome as we always do to our co-host Mr. Gene Robinson. Hello Patrick and it's good to be here from sunny and very, very nice Texas where the weather is great and it's great to be a Jeep owner.
So what's been going on with you Gene? What's new?
Well, a little bit of everything. I don't know since we last spoke we of course went on that search in Plano and we've been actually writing the after action report on that one and it's now going to be out here fairly soon under the NIST banner and all the things that do and worked with the FAA and worked with the FAA quite well and that's just been a part of it and then from there it's just been kind of a snowball and I know you wouldn't know anything about that because you don't have anything to do these days either from what I understand, right?
No, just you know sitting around counting my money. Oh, I forgot counting. I have to get somebody else to do that for me. I don't have time for that.
I know. Yeah, well, you know, there's lots going on and it's kind of funny, you know, I'm trying to hopefully hear with the days getting shorter I'll get more time because people were up at that UAS show in Reno and people were coming by the booth and beating us up about the podcast and how come there's so few and far between?
A little bit of time there. Yeah, it's a time thing mainly to keep all of the balls in the air. I'm doing the, you know, I don't know if we talked about it on the podcast, but I'm also doing the FAA Beyond Visual Line of Sight Committee. Right.
Yeah, and I'm trying to actually get a few companies and I did get one guy that does search and rescue with Unmanned Aircraft Systems. You may know him to write up a, let's say, a news case scenario for operations beyond visual line of sight. Working on that. If you follow the news, not you, I know you know, but looks like we are getting a change of leadership at the UASIO and I think that that's already happened as we have someone else signing off on the documentation and also the COAs, which I was part of it.
I was actually an observer on a demo yesterday that had a COA signed by the new acting manager. I forget her name right now. It's Jacqueline, but I forget her last name. Robinson.
I remember that. There you go. I was, but you know, I wanted, I didn't want to be the association thing and be wrong, you know. I will say right up front that there is no relation between us or anything else.
Although go to ancestry.com and check. Maybe. This could be your insider, you know, link to get something done. So that ought to be interesting.
You know, the NPRM supposedly coming out still. I hear there is going to be a mini exodus from the FAA. I don't know if this is a reason why, but I would say that is probably an opportune moment to exit. I think you're going to, the proof is going to be in the pudding and the NPRM in years of, let's say, special interest dysfunction.
It's all going to be in there and I think people are going to go nuts. Personally, that's what I think. So maybe that has something to do with it. We have not, you know, we've been waiting around for a while.
So we'll have to see what happens there. The other thing, did you catch the South Park last night?
I missed it. Unfortunately, I heard it was hysterical though. Okay, no spoiler alerts please. I don't want to know what the quadcopter and multimodern did.
No, it was kind of funny, but you know, Craig's mom, tough break for her. I got to say, but anyway, it was kind of funny. It could have been worse, so it wasn't that bad. Other good news is, it looks like Aerovel and Ted McGeer got some good news about ITAR and being able to sell their Flexrotor overseas.
So that's encouraging that there might be a possible income stream for people overseas, which is good. I was out on a demo yesterday for the parks, state parks, California state parks. There was other people there and a lot of people that, names that you've heard and people that we've met and people that have been on air and people that I've never met in person. It was pretty good, nice little demo, beautiful weather out here, skies were sunny, no wind and everything was, the goals were accomplished.
Some of that hopefully I captured in video and we'll put up on the YouTube channel someday soon here. As soon as I get some spare time to make that happen. But you know, before we go much longer here, I want to bring on our guest as Mr. Brandon Basso from 3D Robotics.
We're going to have him on and we're going to talk about some of 3D Robotics new offerings or turnkey offerings. So without further ado, hi Brandon, how's it going?
How are you doing today? Very well, very well. Thanks for having me on. Hey, no problem.
This is kind of what we do is we try and get the information out to the community so they know what's available and how to use it. So before we go on much further, maybe you could give, you know, I know you and I've known you for a while, but maybe you could give the listeners a little background on yourself, how you became involved with unmanned aircraft and 3D Robotics. Yeah, sure. No problem.
Well, I've been doing UAV related things for quite a while now. I was at Cal and I worked at a kind of medium sized UAV research group called the Center for Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles, which is usually shortened C3UV and did a ton of work with teams of autonomous vehicles. So how do you get one operator to control, you know, five, ten, hundreds of small UAVs?
And through that work, I kind of became aware of 3D Robotics and we were using large Piccolo autopilot, large scale aircraft, MLB bat fours and kind of towards the end of it, I started working on RG Pilot One, this was maybe in 2009 and met Chris Anderson through that, CEO of 3D Robotics. And then when it came time, when I was looking for a job a couple years ago, I found Chris again and here I am at 3DR. So that's kind of the brief background. The brief background.
Yes, and I know it's been, you know, it's kind of funny, you know, we were kind of talking about that, the time thing earlier in the podcast and I'm sure you're kind of in the same boat, things are moving so fast, you probably have little in the way of spare time. And, you know, so I, go ahead, I'm sorry, I stomped on you here. Oh, no, no, no, no. Well, you know, it's just so much is happening, it's
so dynamic, but you know, and that's kind of, you know, I mean, I know that 3DR is going through a lot of changes, a lot of exciting things are going on and changes and partnerships and development and things like that.
And so, you know, before we get into the reason you're on about the mapping and whatever else, I'd like to, maybe if you can kind of talk about that, talk about, say, some of the changes that are going on at 3DR and some of the new directions and things like that. I know it's, there's a lot and it's kind of a broad thing, but maybe you can speak to that a little. Yeah, for sure. Well, 3DR has gone through many changes, it's changed as a company quite a bit since when it started and,
you know, back around 2007 when it was founded by Jordy and Chris, you know, the way you would interact with 3DR is you'd get a bag of parts and you could solder them together and make your own ARGY pilot.
And that was great for a lot of people like myself who was doing research and had the ability to do that and more the kind of the interest in doing that. And then maybe a year or two later, we started integrating those parts into autopilots and that was our main product for a while. And then those autopilots became ready to fly aircraft, which became a bigger and bigger part of the business. And then of course with the release of the 3DR Iris, kind of our first real consumer product, an even bigger part.
So it kind of transitioned from hobbyist to consumer and hobbyist is still supported very much and is at the core of the company. Consumer is becoming a bigger part and will continue to be a big part. And now with the introduction of our new mapping platforms, you know, industrial is becoming a big part. And it's really interesting to see how each of those is informed the next step because we actually do have quite a bit of feedback from what we do industrial to consumer and consumer to industrial and hobbyist to all the others.
So that's kind of the general narrative arc. But you know, as always, we're interested in making the aircraft more accessible to a broader range of people. And that's true for both industrial and consumer lines. That has a lot to do with UI, UX, ease of use, things of that.
Right. Yeah. I mean, you guys are definitely covering, let's say, a broad spectrum of end users and developers, which is good. And, you know, I saw you up there at that UAS show in Reno, the mapping show, and I watched your presentation and I was, you know, impressed.
You know, we're definitely dialing it up a couple of notches as far as where you guys are headed. And I think that the conversation was candid as far as where you guys have been, where you're at, where you're going and all the rest of that. And I had to off to you guys, I think that that message is really coming together and looks good. And I know, you know, it's hard.
It must be, you guys must be kind of difficult to cover that whole spectrum and meet everyone's expectations. No, for sure. I mean, it's a very broad range of people. And, you know, I think the interesting thing is that, you know, if you look at other industries, I think that commercial, what's considered, you know, let's say consumer electronics and what's considered industrial products are quite different and the users are fairly different.
But, you know, I really think that for us, you know, they are differentiated, but they're also the same in a lot of ways. They're people who are, you know, maybe not so interested in the business of tinkering and soldering and maybe even flying in some cases. So, you know, the fact that we have, say, an auto takeoff button now in Droid Planet where you press a button and the aircraft takes off and hovers, you know, things like that are interesting to both the parents that want to take pictures of their kids' soccer game and to the farmer who wants to collect a bunch of data.
So, I think that there's actually quite a bit of overlap between those areas. Right. Well, and I do think it's interesting, you know, the consumer, you know, with, I guess, the user expectations on the consumer side. Did you see South Park last night?
I did. I missed it. I was watching the John. All right.
We see where your loyalties lie here. Yeah, I mean, it is kind of funny when people expect a consumer and people who want to, you know, use this as a tool and all the rest of that. And that kind of, you know, segues into kind of the theme of today's program. You know, so we see some of the new products here.
And, you know, I think this is an interesting thing. Is this kind of the first foray into turnkey offerings for 3D robotics?
By that, you mean the mapping platforms are the first? Yeah. So I would say, I would say no, actually, that the Iris, which maybe that was launched at the end of 2012 or so, and Iris Plus more recently, those were really our first. We've of course had RTF aircrafts before that ready to fly.
But those were really our first aircraft that, you know, were really out of the box, you know, take it off and fly and have a good time with it. So the mapping aircraft, I think, are just kind of a logical extension of that because now it's not only take it out of the box, fly, but it's take it out of the box, fly and gather some meaningful data for what you're trying to do. So it's even a step further as far as automation is concerned. And that's kind of borne out in how we've automated the mission planning process and other parts of it.
Are you on a train? The three-car office here in Berkeley are fantastic, except when you need to be on the radio. We're right down by the water, beautiful view, but you know, we have a train that runs right next to the building. So sorry about that to your listeners.
I'll try and mute the stream. That's okay. It's just kind of funny. It always works that way.
I don't have the cats are not meowing today. I guess they're busy. But anyway, yeah, so it is, you know, okay, so it's true. You guys did have, you know, some kind of turnkey products, but those have worked something that's a little bit different here.
You have something that's kind of a package that's actually for, let's say, an industry. And there's a lot of, I think, excitement about that. Like you said, there's a lot of, say, end users who don't want to do the tinkering and, let's say, collaborating and putting all the parts and pieces and everything together. They want to buy something.
They want to pull it out of the box. They want to learn how to use it. And they want to start, let's say, gathering actual data. And so maybe you can talk about these.
I mean, you have two different mapping products. And maybe you can kind of talk about them and then talk about, you know, the thinking behind each one and who you kind of envision the end user to be for each one of those products. For sure. Yeah.
And, you know, I'd be remiss to not mention the rest of the industry and how mapping is not really new. But I think it's important to highlight how, you know, what we're doing is different from, you know, what SenseFly and Trimble and Topcon and those companies have. So, you know, we make two mapping aircraft ready to fly, which are built on X8 platform, Oxycopter coaxial, and the Aero platform, which is a Skywalker airframe, just built up nicely, higher end components, higher end power system. And,
you know, with those platforms that we've sold for, you know, the past year, you can get a camera, some software that runs on the camera, a control cable that talks to the autopilot.
And then, of course, you get Pix4D mapper, and that's a special version of Pix4D, the photogrammetry software and our photogrammetry partner. So you get all that, plus you get the open source ground station that you always got, which is Mission Planner and Droid Planner very soon. And, you know, end to end, you've got all the components for the three essential parts of mapping, which are plan, fly, and analyze. You plan your mission, hit go, and it really is hands off from the time you hit go until the time you land.
And then you do some analysis, and all the analysis is in Pix4D mapper, which bundles with the whole package. So, you know, these aircraft cost $5,400 each, which might not seem like a lot, but it certainly would be a lot for me if I were on a farm or construction site. But relative to what the competition is doing and what the industry has done, you know, these aircraft that I mentioned, the Sly Pirates, rather, Trimble Topcon, you know, these are in the $25,000 plus range. They're way closer to what a military UAS might be like.
And, you know, it's for good reason. They're highly optimized platforms, and they do their jobs really well. But what I think is most interesting and is actually part of the design of aircraft is, you know, there's no secret about how expensive UAVs can be. We've seen that from the military.
But the question is, what's the sweet spot of the price point versus tradeoff of features? You know, where is that tradeoff?
And that's really what we're trying to figure out because, you know, the history of 3DR is interesting things happen when you start making things very inexpensive. And that's what's going on here as well. And I will strategically mute as the next train goes by. Well, that's all, it's kind of interesting how you put that because I do think that, you know, the price points even in this unmanned aircraft system sector, the military stuff is totally off the chart.
That's definitely like animals that live on a preserve. That's something that, that's the analogy that I use. And the rest of us are out here trying to make a living scratching that out of what's left. I think the price points are all going to come, you know, they have to, let's say, settle down.
But these price points don't seem ridiculous to me. I think these are something that somebody professionally can, let's say, justify as a tool. And I think that that's probably a good place to start. It'll be interesting to see how many of these you guys sell and what the interest is and things like that.
But I was hoping to, I should give Gene a chance to jump in here. Gene, did you have anything that you'd like to add or questions you'd like to ask?
No, no, I've not much really. I really applaud and encourage, you know, everyone to do what they can to bring more reliability and repeatability to what we need. And, you know, you have to get into that production mode to get it done, have the parts pipeline to make it viable. So I've, you know, you've kind of got a cheerleader back here going, yeah, let's go, let's get this thing going.
So. Yeah, so, you know, and maybe that's something that we can, you know, you did say you had some upgraded parts and you guys are using some other parts and save more of a professional grade and whatever else. But the other thing I want to make sure we hit before we run out of time, and that usually happens pretty quick, maybe you could elaborate on the PIX4D software that's bundled with these mapping products. For sure, yeah.
So PIX4D is a company out of Switzerland and they make professional photogrammetry software and people who are already doing photogrammetry from, say, manned aircraft or larger UAS would be familiar with that software. And there's many other options out there. There's Agisoft, there are Photoscan, that is, tons of others, open source packages. And really what it came down to for us was having a good relationship with that company, being able to pick up the phone and talk to them, and also finding a company that shared similar sensibilities about ease of use.
So if you go use a professional product for doing photogrammetry, some of them are really hard to use and it's not just, you know, one button kind of solution. And that's because the nature of the work is inherently complicated. You know, if you use something like Premiere or I forget what the Final Cut, the Mac, you know, video editing tool, that's fundamentally complicated stuff. And photogrammetry is fundamentally complicated.
But the nice thing about PIX4D is I think they've struck a really good balance between, hey, give me one button to push to get some results and feel good about what I did. And then also have all the advanced tools like ground control point control, the ability to add manual tie points and all that stuff that you might want to do because, you know, at UAS Reno I met a gentleman who is a professional surveyor. And he does a lot of volume estimation. These are kind of the crazy applications you hear about at these conferences.
And his whole business has to do with moving dirt from A to B. And if his estimate of where his dirt piles are, are off by just a little bit, like if his orthomosaic accuracy is, let's say, 40 centimeters accurate versus about 5 centimeters, which is what he can tolerate, that's millions of dollars in the difference of a contract, that whole quote. So you really need a pro product for doing these kinds of professional survey grade applications. And that's what PIX4D is.
But I definitely want to emphasize the fact that, you know, it's built to work really well with our aircraft, with our flight logs. And it is built to be very, very easy to use. Well, you know, you hit several points I'd like to address. And one of them is, you know, you're talking about the quality of the data.
And it's interesting that you say that because, you know, the different price points I think also reflect that. You know, you kind of alluded to the one gentleman needs a certain resolution or it's not really worth it to him. But again, you get down, let's say to the nitty gritty of the deal, different people have different tolerances for the level of accuracy that they need, and again, what they can charge. So I think that there's kind of, you know, like an economy of scale and let's say the sensors and products and things like that.
Where some of these other systems that go up might cause more money, but you know, it might be something else that somebody needs. Was that kind of factored into the, let's say, production of these two 3D products?
Yeah, for sure. I guess your question is, you know, how did we design that price point?
And of course, you know, more price gets you higher quality. But you know, what's the quality trade off essentially?
Is that pretty much the idea? Yes. Yeah. So, you know, coming from a background of doing the most expensive thing, you know, my research group at Berkeley, we flew these quarter million dollar aircraft.
There's a nice article on the Atlantic about this this month, actually, that goes over this. But you know, it's a really bad day when you put that aircraft into the ground. And the thing is, gravity doesn't care about how expensive your aircraft is, is what it comes down to. The physics don't care.
Physics don't care. Exactly. And I think that that is a huge driver because there's this nasty little cost spiral you can get into where, OK, I've got my aircraft. It costs a hundred dollars.
I made it out of foam from Home Depot. And then I put one of the cheap GoPro knockoffs on it. Great. It does what I want it to do.
OK, but now I want a little bit better quality. So I'm going to put a GoPro on it. Maybe I buy a Hero 4 Black even, which is five hundred dollars. Well, now, you know, now I'm thinking about buying like slightly nicer servos and rods because mechanical failures, you know, I'm like at an 80 percent, 20 percent out there.
OK, so I start increasing the cost there. And you can kind of see where I'm going. And this this kind of logic goes and goes and goes until you've got, you know, ground support crew and until you have checklists that are a mile long and you're really averse to flying. So, you know, I'm not claiming that this price point fifty four hundred dollars is the end on the all.
It's really just a guess at what what the market can bear. But it's a very aggressive guess. If you look at the the competition and basically we just looked at, you know, what's the best we can do with off the shelf parts we're using. We're using off the shelf hobby grade stuff where we're using point and shoot cameras.
But, you know, cheap hardware, I'd say I'd say probably hobby grade hardware, not not that cheap, it's high end hobby grade stuff, but very smart software, very smart software is what it comes down to. And that goes into the software and camera, of course, the ground station and then the aircraft itself. So, you know, I don't really have like a good answer as to why, you know, that price point in particular, it was based on a lot of market analysis and it was based on, you know, shaking things up a little bit also, you know, because it's a quarter of comparable aircraft.
Yeah, but I mean, you know, the other thing with that is, you know, when you're kind of pioneering this stuff, you know, you kind of got to make guesses, you know, you have to take with what you know. And you guys have this track record of that spectrum that we talked about. And I mean, you know, I think you have to put it out there and see what the market's going to bear. I don't think that it's that the price point is unreasonable at all.
I mean, I think as the, and I keep talking about this evolution of technology, and I think as we kind of go forward and these become more, let's say, consumer-y type products that somebody professional might buy, you know, you think, okay, well, you know, what's my return on investment? What's the quality of the data I can get?
And how long is it until I get my money back? When am I making money on this?
And I, you know, you guys are going to have to, you're out there pioneering this and you're going to have to kind of, you know, go with the flow and figure that one out. So no one can really fault you for that. Although you can probably find people on the internet that would fault you for it. But you know, they're very easy to come by.
As I've noticed out there on the internet, there's tons of critics, but whatever. The other question I had, you know, is this is kind of, let's say, targeted towards the more, let's say, professional customer, because I don't know if a lot of hobbyist map makers, but you know, you never know. Could be a whole group out there. What's the learning curve on this?
You know, if I was to go out here and buy this and I was a mapping professional, what do you think the investment in time is before I'm able to make some, let's say, go out and do some jobs? Sure. That's a great question. And, you know, just to go back to the point you had before we are, we're always going to serve the hobbyist.
And we do have a mapping upgrade package, which is designed for people who want to, you know, BYO, they've got their own airframe. And they want to integrate this into, and they don't necessarily want to figure out all the stuff we had to figure out about, oh, how do we do camera control appropriately?
So I forget the price points for that, actually. But, you know, everything less the airframe. So there's that to mention. But, you know, to your point on, you know, what's the time investment?
I think that you got to break it down into pieces. So what's the time investment to learn how to fly one of our aircraft?
If it's a copter, we generally see people flying auto missions reliably, and being a decent safety pilot, I'd say within two to four hours of training. And that's being able to understand failsafe and understand how the system works and fly autonomous mission. To be a pro is, of course, you know, more time, but in order to do basic mission planning, which is pretty much what survey requires, four hours. Then to be able to do the analysis and PIX4D, there's actually a great webinar that PIX4D just put up today on how to use their particular variants of software for 3D-R.
I'd say you're going to spend, you know, anything from 10 minutes just to get quick results, to maybe, I want to say five hours or so to understand that piece of software. And so it's really not a burden. You know, you could get to understand the system fairly well within a day of work, which I think is very important, because a lot of people out there, you know, if we're talking about a farmer, they're not willing to spend a day to learn how to use their new DeWalt Thrill. That's like not the amount of time that they want to spend.
And that's what this should be. But you know, recognizing the fact that we're not totally there yet, as far as UAVs go, I can give you one anecdote, which is we work with a fantastic wine grower up in Sonoma, Brian Kunde. He's got a winery drink, DRNK, and very much a technology leader, very much a pioneer. And, you know, he's a guy who's gone to UC Davis, has a degree in viticulture.
He's a fairly techie guy. Certainly not a drone expert, though. And he flies our systems totally on his own. We go visit him, and he's operating them.
And I'd say he spent on the order of a couple days in aggregate to learn how to fly them well. So, you know, that's one anecdote. And he uses it to actually make his products better and to save money. There's a ton on the analytics side as well, as he's doing.
I'm gonna have to someday get out there. I've seen pictures and you keep talking this winery up. So I think I should get up there and maybe try some of the wineries. Yeah, I mean, his family has one of the biggest wineries in Sonoma, Kunde Family Estates, and we work with them a little bit as well.
A beautiful site, very worth going to. Yeah, well, one of these days I'll have to make it out there. I mean, I went to, we did do that, what was it, the Iron Horse wineries thing for Earth Day a while back, this spring. That was fun.
Lots of mariachi. Yeah, you gotta take more field trips, that's it. Well, you know, I'm busy, I'm bogged down in this stuff. God, if you saw the desk, it's a miracle my wife doesn't throw me out of here.
It's total disaster, but there's a lot of work to plow through. Well, you know, all of that was really interesting. And I do want to say, if you want to, the do-it-yourself map community, if you want to send hate mail, send that to Gene. The do-it-yourself to Walt Drill community, you can send the hate mail to Brandon.
No, I'm just teasing. Anyway, Brandon, could you give us the website for, I mean, most people probably know it, but we have international listeners who may be hiding under a rock somewhere. Yeah, for sure. I'm just pulling it up here.
So it's 3drobotics.com is the website. You can find us on Twitter, of course, at 3DR, which is actually where we do a ton of our support and just listening to users. Also our Facebook group, 3D Robotics, particularly the Iris owners page. And then for the mapping aircraft, that's 3drobotics.com forward slash mapping dash drones.
If you just Google 3D robotics and mapping, it's the first link that comes up as well. And you could also find me on that site and on Twitter, just at Brandon Basso. All right. Hey, that's all the time we have for today.
Thanks for coming on. It was very informative. Good luck with the products and I'm sure I'll be seeing you soon in the future. Gene, nice as always to talk to you.
You were kind of the client cheerleader this episode. That's right. Someone's got to do it. Appreciate it, sir.
See everyone next week, right here at the UAS News Podcast. Adios. Great. Thanks.