Comment by team_gold
12 days ago
As someone who has a DJI Mini what are the options for a consumer drone made by a US company? Everything on https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas-cleared-list is either widely different, 15x as expensive, not purchasable by civilians at all, or all of the above. Parret appears to have stopped selling their consumer model entirely. Skydio 2+ seems like the closest thing but it also no longer appears to be for sale either. All their links to the starter kit are dead and only options is to contact sales for enterprise deals.
There's nothing.
Skydio exited the consumer market. Their drones had good autonomy and flight characteristics. However, they struggled with wireless link quality due to the use of consumer WiFi, and had much older, inferior camera sensors compared to even contemporary DJI drones. They were also ridiculously loud and inefficient. Their enterprise drones are comically expensive and loaded with nickel-and-dime cloud features.
Parrot drones struggle with the same issues as Skydio (Skydio actually used a Parrot remote controller for their consumer drones), plus their autonomy isn't nearly as good as even Skydio's, the overall drone behavior is "clunky" (slow boot times, slow connection times, non-responsive flight controls), and even basic flight is more challenging.
The main issues plaguing US consumer drones are imaging sensors and wireless link. LTE and other well-suited long range wireless technologies capable of handling speed differential between the station and access point are locked in a vault of patents. Imaging sensors are legendarily impossible to acquire in low to moderate quantities and image sensor parameters are carefully locked behind a billion levels of NDA (thus why even the Raspberry Pi camera is full of DRM).
I assume one of the goals of this is to change that by making it feasible for US companies to compete at least on the domestic market.
Ukraine has shown that having domestic at-scale consumer drone production is a critical military capability. I bet part of the motivation behind this is protectionism to make sure this capability can be built up. Otherwise any war against China starts with China being able to make many thousands of recon aircraft / precision guided projectiles per day, likely with mostly or entirely domestic supply chains, without even going to a war economy, while the US cannot manufacture the same class of weapon at any comparable scale.
>China being able to make many thousands of recon aircraft / precision guided projectiles per day
The US might be able to stop an invasion of Taiwan with just naval and air assets. My guess is that battery-powered drones don't have enough range to be a significant threat against naval assets (even for recon) and don't have enough speed to be relevant against air assets that are not themselves battery-powered drones.
It's scary to think about what China could do with the $100 million-$150 million the US spends on a single F-35.
I was on a project that was subject to the cleared UAS list you linked, and I cannot recommend either Parrot (incredibly long boot times, underpowered motors meant it was slow and had poor station keeping in high winds) or Skydio (bad heat management/low thermal cutoffs to the point that during the California high desert summer our unit wouldn't even start due to reporting that it was overheated) at all. So maybe its not too bad that they're no longer for sale.
Autel Nano or Lite+.
Some Autel drone are made in the USA, but not all.
Edit: added the Lite and fixed formatting
> Some Autel drone are made in the USA
You mean are assembled in USA. Most soft and hardware is still made in China.
I'll build a drone for you with open source components if you are shopping for one, it will cost more than a DJI but less than these other options.
Any guides or pointers on how to do this myself? Looking into pixhawk seems like most of the options are still pretty obscure. I own a 3D printer and am not afraid of a soldering iron :)
Will it be as good. I mean control, video recording and signal. Compatible with some HD goggles? I really doubt, but if you can explain...
I have built drones before so I can answer.
The short answer is yes. It would be about a billion times better than anything you can buy RTF but also a lot more expensive.
Some (if not most) of the open source hardware would probably be built in China but this hardware can be flashed with Open Source software like betaflight.
If you doubt, just look at companies that sell drone parts/kits like https://www.getfpv.com/fpv.html check out their goggles section, they are all high end.
You ask about video re cording/signal. How can you possibly beat being able to hand-pick your VTX/VRX chip, or your camera? How can any pre-built commercial drone possibly compete with that?
Same with control. You can buy the best motors, the best ESCs, the best carbon fiber frame, the best parts to build and secure all the above. You just cant compete.
But some people lack the time, skills or patience to learn how to build one, and learn the software.
If you can do that at scale, it sounds like you have a viable business. There is clearly a demand for it.
The market will open up for new companies after the China ban takes effect. Right now they can't compete.
That's just an excuse, after 10 years failing to compete. Western drone companies have received billions in investments to make competing drones, but repeatedly fail, for some reason.
Western company can't compete, but that's on them. Banning DJI won't change anything, Western companies have to get their act together.
Frankly, the DoD likely spent something like 5-8 trillion dollars over the last 10 years.
If we establish that drone manufacturing is a matter of national security, it seems critically important to understand why domestic production keeps failing and fix those problems rather than just giving up.
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This isn't really true. Western drone companies haven't bothered competing in the consumer space, but they have made lots of advancement in the non-consumer space, where, arguably, the profits are better. Why try to compete with DJI for mail order drones going to kids when you can get a multi-million dollar contract with the Pentagon?
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I mean... 10 years of not being able to compete with companies subsided with a world powers national treasury isn't really saying much of anything
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> Right now they can't compete.
Why? Because they aren't good enough, and if they have no competition they'll have to actually do something?