My First AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2017 Drone Show Experience

"The art of the possible for future commercial drones is here." - Ron Stearns

We came. We saw. We listened. We learned.

We were excited and nervous in the days leading up to being a first-time exhibitor. Did we get our messaging and brand positioning right? Did we bring enough of X? What will people think of our booth if it doesn’t have a life-sized functioning drone associated with it? Will attendees get that we’re not a drone company by focus? How will our drone design panel be received? Will people have any clue what Ron is talking about? Could we have prepared anymore more than we already had and so on? Our fears quickly dissipated when we heard comments like, “You all are different” and “I like your business model.”

Based on all the feedback we received at our booth and talking with various stakeholders we learned that many of our assumptions going into AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2017 were correct. Many of our booth visitors echoed the same sentiment about many unmet needs of the commercial drone market are not being met by existing drone manufacturers. While this may be our coming out party in the commercial drone space with our first AUVSI XPONENTIAL under our belt, as a full-service product development company this is hardly our first rodeo with all things unmanned and robotic. With over 40 years combined experience in the aerospace and industrial design manufacturing industries, it only made sense to attend and we’re glad we did. 

As the underlying theme carried over from 2017 FAA UAS Symposium by the cautiously optimistic Michael P. Huerta surrounding aviation safety, autonomy and the like, we saw some amazing technology that really has some game-changing potential, but often the vendor’s offering was only part of the puzzle whether it be a software package, a hardware component, or the ability to scale quickly to meet demand. The one thing we do know for sure is that the commercial drone market has a bright future as entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers, commercial drone manufacturers and ultimately end-users.  

Some of our key takeaways include:

The defense and RC drone communities are converging into the emerging commercial market before they bifurcate into realistic end market application offerings.

We saw a lot of the normal crowd that has been showing for the last couple years, but it was refreshing to see what new entrants in the commercial drone market have to offer. Some of this is hard to see before the show due to startups having a legitimate idea, but not having the marketing and public relations budget to get the word out. One such company we were in impressed with came to us by way of Switzerland was Flyability. While most everybody is thinking bigger, faster, stronger Flyability was thinking smaller and agiler.

The shiny object syndrome is currently in full effect as the buzz was building up to AUVSI XPONENTIAL due to premarketing activities from many companies looking to become a household name. While our strategy was not to show a drone at our booth, for the previously mentioned reasons, we noticed many exhibitors were displaying commercial drones that they themselves did not build. Much like a game of Poker, this speaks volumes to us as a tall tale sign that there is a lack of experience in providing a truly unique and authentic product offering. It will take some time to determine the clear winners and losers in the coming months. The good news is, like any disruptive industry or technology-driven innovations, the market self-regulates itself on which companies are truly providing value-driven propositions and sustainable business models as marketing first campaigns will fall by the wayside. Manufacturers will have more pressure to be responsive to the specific needs of not only the end market applications, but to drone-as-a-service (DaaS), and subsystem providers. Once this begins to happen, in the next year or two, you will start to see real innovation take off.

Safety is paramount to the public and has started to become an issue for some major drone manufacturers.

Even before we were talking about attending liability associated with the notion of “drones falling out of the sky” or some other scary thought that the general public might think up without really understanding the safety record for aviation in the United States. It’s actually better than the automotive industry, but the media is great at making much to do about nothing. However, in some cases, there is some legitimate concern from pilot error to weaponized drones. Many factors and variables will come into play; drone delivery, remote infrastructure surveying, noise pollution, privacy policies, no fly zones for airports, and more.

We believe this is something that comes with the territory and certainly not a new phenomenon to those in product development space and will be a challenge that can be overcome because ultimately the benefits outweigh the risks. We can point to autonomous vehicles currently being tested on the ground with technologies like LiDAR by companies like Tesla, Ford, GM, Diamler-Chrysler, and Google. This combined with GIS and GPS makes for an appealing solution for the commercial drone industry. These technologies are actually making the general public safer in the current environment of driver distraction deaths related to texting.

 "I hope the future of drones is boring. As the CEO of a drone company, I obviously stand to gain from the rise of drones, but I don’t see that happening if we are focused on the  excitement of drones. The sign of a successful technology is not that it thrills but that it becomes essential and accepted, fading into the wallpaper of modernity. Electricity was once a magic trick, but now it is assumed. The internet is going the same way. My end goal is for drones to be thought of as just another unsexy industrial tool, like agricultural machinery or generators on construction sites — as obviously useful as they are unremarkable." - Chris Anderson

There is no silver bullet.

The quadcopters and drones of today will be replaced by more advanced user specific platforms because the end markets will demand it as the current options only get customers partially the way to their end goal. As business operations look at commercial drones as a cost-saving efficiency to gain an advantage and gain market share, limiting them to a cheap off-the-shelf platform will cause the opposite to occur rather than the intended effect. Environmental conditions will play a factor in operational costs for companies that maintain a multi-variation fleet service. Updating software and firmware so devices talk to each other in the cloud. The goal is seamless integration.

The iPhone 7 is much different from its predecessors. Any good product design requires constant iterations, but like any great product or products, the requirements change based on the user experience usually centered on convenience, accessibility, responsiveness and ease of use. The R&D and customer service feedback loop, if you will. The commercial drones of tomorrow don’t exist because the end market is just starting to voice the art of the possible as a result of the Part 107 decision. It will either be a modular system, a product variant platform series or a combination of both.

It’s not about the drone. It’s about the data. Big data, but real-time is a choke point.

As Chris Anderson, of 3DRobotics puts it, ‘Industries have long sought data from above, generally through satellites or planes, but drones are better “sensors in the sky” than both. They gather higher-resolution and more-frequent data than satellites (whose view is obscured by clouds over two-thirds of the planet at any time), and they’re cheaper, easier, and safer than planes. Drones can provide “anytime, anywhere” access to overhead views with an accuracy that rivals laser scanning — and they’re just getting started. In this century’s project to extend the internet to the physical world, drones are the path to the third dimension — up. They are, in short, the “internet of flying things.”’

Currently, the DaaS providers and end-user markets are beholden to the third party drone manufacturers. This ownership needs to change for a company utilizing commercial drones as part of their daily operations to make informative decisions for speed, agility, and cost-effectiveness when taking on competitors and increasing market share.

The other big problem to solve is broadband wireless for offloading and analyzing large amounts of data from the field. When you solve the broadband wireless issue in remote locations that are popular among commercial drone applications like construction, oil and gas, forestry, infrastructure, and agriculture the art of the possible for real-time data collection and operational forecasting becomes a game-changer. This is something that Facebook has been trying to solve for a couple years now as they take on the telecom industry whom we saw walking the floor.

We talked about some of these pain points at our Drone Design: Drone Design: Enabling Longevity and Market Acceptance Through Design Methodology with leaders from Intel, British Petroleum, Duke Energy, British Petroleum, Measure, and Oceaneering.

Current custom solutions are considered cost prohibitive.

This was a sentiment from some, but not all of our booth visitors. In reality, we believe it is a matter of perspective and education. This is where the fun for us begins with a friendly rebuttal of asking a simple question like, “What is the cost of doing business with an inferior solution that will cost you money in the long run due to the limitations associated with that platform offering?” When we frame the conversation around becoming a trusted partner who is more interested in creating a sustainable business solution than making a quick sale that person starts to realize the long game strategy.

Commercial drones, done right, can provide deeply detailed visual data for a tiny fraction of the cost of acquiring the same data by other means. They’re becoming crucial in workplace safety, removing people from dangerous situations and scenarios such as cell-tower inspection. Instant savings in worker’s compensation claims that can be diverted to other parts of the operation. They literally offer a new view into the existing business model: Their low-overhead perspective is bringing new insights and capabilities to fields and home base alike.

A good use case study, as pointed out by Anderson, can be found in the construction industry. A typical commercial construction project runs 80% over budget and 20 months behind schedule, according to McKinsey. On-screen, in the architect’s CAD file, everything looks perfect. But when the “rubber meets the road” not everything goes as planned due to human factors. And the difference between concept and reality is where about $3 trillion of that $8 trillion gets lost, in a cascade of change orders, rework, and schedule slips, etc.

Mistakes, changes, and surprises are unavoidable whenever idealized designs meet the real world, but why not improve processes and procedure when they can be minimized by spotting clashes early enough to fix them, work around them, or at least update the model to reflect changes for future work? As the saying rings true, “Time is money” and at the end of the day, commercial drones are a new way of resolving issues to old problems.

We are all too familiar with the pain points the drone market is feeling by end-users being pigeon-holed into using off-the-shelf solutions that were never designed for their application requirements in mind. As we walked the floor when not manning the booth we recognized a common theme that many traditional industries that once were disruptive use the same sales pitch are, “Our drone(s) do it all.” The reality is there are many software and hardware manufacturers playing in the space that isn't offering a truly complete market specific solution because they have capability gaps in the product design process. They may be really good at designing engineering, software engineering, engineering or manufacturing, but they don’t have a combination of all the above. The linchpin in all of this is understanding embedded flight systems integration. Everything else is rudimentary pieces being applied to a 3D space that has been reinvigorated by the Part 107 approval in Congress.

Drones are meant to close that gap and at the end of the day the industry will continue to grow and evolve as the technology is moving so fast in this current gold rush to be the next household name like; Ford, John Deere, Caterpillar, Harley-Davidson, etc. The key players will change and AUVSI XPONENTIAL will look like a different show next year and in our opinion only get bigger and better. We’ve already booked our spot next year because the spots were filling up fast. We look forward to creating new relationships while nurturing existing ones. We look forward to seeing you next year. In the meantime, if you have any questions regarding custom drone design and manufacturing, please don’t be shy about contacting our knowledgeable team. We handle the dull, dirty, and dangerous so you can focus on servicing your customers and growing your business. Contact us, today!

Velocity Group Commercial Drone Team:

Ron Stearns - Business Development Director, Robotics and Unmanned Systems

Heather Dale Best - Vice President, Sales and Marketing

Andrew Stelmack - General Manager   

Larry O'Cull - ‎Leader - Design and Engineering

Mike Dupont - Senior Firmware Engineer

Adam Terpstra - Sales Engineer

Velocity Group Commercial Drone Design & Manufacturing