Commercial Drones Fm

Experience the story behind the expedition to capture the world's first thermal, radiometric images of humpback whales' blowholes with drones. This is Expedition: Too Hot For Snot. Host Ian Smith takes you aboard the R/V Cachelot, a research vessel operated by Ocean Alliance. With drones and thermal cameras in tow, Ian—along with Dr. Iain Kerr, the Ocean Alliance crew, and Randall Warnas of FLIR—depart from Gloucester, Massachusetts in search of humpback whales.

Josh Ziering (JZ) and Josh Pruitt of San Francisco software startup, Kittyhawk, join Ian for a roundtable discussion. The trio chat about recent drone industry news like Section 336, the company's recent $5 million funding, and what the future has in store for Kittyhawk and the drone industry as a whole.

Ian Smith, host of Commercial Drones FM podcast, joins Randy Goers' Drone Radio Show as a guest to talk about what has happened in the commercial drone industry over the past 2-years from 2016 to 2018.

DroneBase is one of the world's largest, professional drone service provider networks. Think of it as "Uber for drone pilots". If you need a drone operator to come accomplish a mission for you, chances are, you can get one through DroneBase. Dan Burton is CEO of DroneBase and has been leading the charge at the Southern California-based company since its inception. The company has grown to become a premier name in the DSP (drone service provider) space and represents an approach that can truly scale as the industry grows. DroneBase is also taking experimental approaches to software with an AR (augmented reality) app.

The drone industry report for Q2 2018, brought to you by Commercial Drones FM. Get briefed on the most important and newsworthy happenings from the previous quarter in the drone industry—all in less than 20-minutes. Covered topics include drone hardware, drone software, regulations, drone delivery, funding, mergers and acquisitions, and more.

Drone-based inspections are rocketing in popularity. Businesses are employing drones en masse to help analyze the health of their assets. As onboard sensors and hardware improve, the software that facilitates many of the actual visual inspection activities continues to advance. Ken Falk is CEO and founder of Scopito, a software company from Denmark specializing in helping their clients accomplish efficient drone-based inspections. Ken and Ian speak about why drone inspection software is critical, advancements in A.I. for automatically detecting anomalies in images, and much more.

Hear host Ian Smith answer questions about drones on a podcast instead of always being the one asking them. This week's episode of CDFM is a syndication of Udacity's, The Drawing Board podcast, titled, "All About Drones." Ian is joined by Adam Bry, CEO of Skydio where the two talk... all about drones.

Why is Ford, a legacy automobile company, building drones? Adi Singh, Principal Scientist for UAV Systems at Ford's Silicon Valley office, explains all the ways that Ford is researching and planning on using drones in their global business. And it's not just flying cars.

Nightingale Security is a robotic aerial security company - not a traditional drone company. But they do make robotic aerial security platforms (drones) and fleet management software that their clients deploy to help protect their assets and integrate with their existing security teams. Jack Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Nightingale Security.

Skydio is a very special drone company with a thought-provoking inaugural product. R1, the company's first drone, costs $2,499, is fully autonomous, and it's marketed mainly to hobbyists. So why does a startup's initial product, targeted for consumers, have me so excited? Well, the answer is not what their technology is currently capable of, but what it represents for the future of commercial drones. When designing R1, Skydio took a unique philosophical approach to what's currently available on the market. R1 is different than other drones - it flies itself and doesn't even come with a controller. Adam Bry is CEO and co-founder of Skydio. He graduated from MIT, was one of the early team members of Google X's delivery drone initiative, Project Wing, and then started Skydio. I sat down with Adam to learn about what's possible right now with the powerful onboard processors and AI that guides Skydio drones, unscathed, through crowded, obstacle-laden environments. We discuss the design inspiration behind R1, a fut

The drone industry report for Q1 2018, brought to you by Commercial Drones FM. Get briefed on the most important and newsworthy happenings from the previous quarter in the drone industry—all in less than 20-minutes. Covered topics include drone hardware, drone software, regulations, drone delivery, funding, mergers and acquisitions, and more. Get the full Q1 2018 drone industry review episode transcript below.

Today, March 28th, 2018, DJI have announced the availability and launch of their Payload SDK. This is important news for the drone industry since it now means that different sensors, regardless of manufacturer, can now integrate directly into DJI drone platforms, as if they were native. Previously, sensor manufacturers had to essentially bolt their products directly onto the drone, meaning that the sensor itself wasn’t even able to access critical metadata from the flight, like altitude, heading, or GPS location, and couldn’t even be controlled by the drone’s software. OEMs are still literally embedding an entire secondary autopilot into sensors because of this. Now, sensor OEMs can ditch the extra weight of the added, redundant components, and just plug into the DJI drone and piggyback directly off of the drone’s existing flight controller and IMU. Operators can now even control the 3rd party sensor directly from DJI’s own app. Of course, this is all tailored to and made possible by DJI’s large, projected 70

Michael Cohen is CEO of Industrial Skyworks, a Toronto-based drone inspection software and services company. Michael teaches Ian about the "just drone" problem, where if you provide industrial inspection services (or nearly any remote sensing services) with *just* a drone and don't pay attention to how to actually deliver, present, and derive value from the data, the entire mission and final deliverables can essentially be rendered useless to the customer. Michael and Ian also discuss valuable lessons learned in scaling drone services and growing a drone business that caters to demanding industrial customers.

What is a drone in a box and why is it important? A drone-in-a-box is essentially a drone that lives inside of a box (stay with me here) and the box is deployed in a specific area, out in the wild, for an extended period of time. The box may have a power source hooked up to it or use solar panels to store power for recharging the drone. The drone, which, of course, lives in the box, will make scheduled flights and fly out of the box automatically to fly a mission and then return to charge its batteries when the mission is complete. Rinse and repeat as desired. This is "getting the human out of the loop." Percepto is an Israeli company who manufacture a full drone-in-a-box system. Dor Abuhasira is the CEO of Percepto, an Israeli company. Dor joins Ian to discuss the technology behind automating these types of drones and what the future holds for drones in a box.

Commercial Drones FM podcast brings you Dave Henderson, Director of Sales, Geospatial Solutions, for Topcon Positioning systems. This episode covers drone solution selling and an overview of Topcon's drone hardware and software products. Dave Henderson’s career in the positioning business spans three decades. Prior to joining Topcon Positioning Systems, Dave held several industry positions as a District & Regional Sales Manager of Surveying, GPS & GIS mapping products. Henderson’s primary focus at Topcon is sales and business development of unmanned aerial systems and LiDAR mobile mapping for the Americas. Throughout his career, Henderson’s focus has been to specialize in assisting businesses, organizations and individuals to implement technology into existing workflows, thereby increasing their productivity and becoming more competitive in the current marketplace. Henderson has become both a knowledgeable resource and a trusted advisor to businesses and organizations throughout the initial discussion

Brian Wynne is President and CEO of AUVSI (Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International), an international nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and supporting the unmanned systems and robotics industry through communication, education, and leadership. Believe it or not, AUVSI was founded in 1972 when the use of target drones as reconnaissance assets during the Vietnam War prompted a group of U.S. Air Force officers and contractors in Dayton, Ohio to form the National Association of Remotely Piloted Vehicles (NARPV), which would later become known as AUVSI. Throughout these 46-years of existence, unmanned systems have changed a lot. Brian and Ian discuss a plethora of topics from drone data security, the dichotomy between commercial and military drones, how blockchain technology can be used to help with drone integration and safety, and what AUVSI's role is as we move towards the future of the commercial drone industry.

The drone industry report for Q4 2017, brought to you by Commercial Drones FM. Get briefed on the most important and newsworthy happenings from the previous quarter in the drone industry. Covered topics include drone hardware, drone software, regulations, drone delivery, funding, & more.

Major General Marke "Hoot" Gibson was Senior Advisor, UAS Integration at the FAA during a critical, two-year period of explosive growth for the drone industry. Very recently, Hoot has moved on from his FAA role and settled into being the first CEO of the NUAIR Alliance, a UAS test site in Syracuse, New York. During his time at the FAA, Hoot drew from his vast wealth of experience as a decorated A-10 Warthog pilot in the U.S. Air Force to advise the Administration on integration efforts of drones into the National Airspace System (NAS). Hoot and Ian discuss the FAA's recent Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) program and how it positively affects not only commercial drone operators, but the way that the FAA fundamentally does business. The two additionally explore plenty of other initialisms; Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM), UAS Integration Pilot Program (UASIPP), Counter UAS (cUAS), Remote Identification, and more.

DJI is, by far, the world's largest drone company. Recently, there have been a slew of controversial reports and conversations about the Chinese drone giant in the media, across social channels, and in boardrooms. From allegedly sharing data from U.S.-based drones with the Chinese government, to potential legal action against a security researcher who was part of their bug bounty program. Choosing Commercial Drones FM as the channel in which to further discuss these topics, Michael Perry, Managing Director of North America for DJI, sits down with Ian to provide unscripted background and insight into all of the latest news surrounding DJI.

2017 was a banner year for the drone industry. While the drone market as a whole grew, plenty of assumptions were proven false. Colin Snow, The Drone Analyst, is CEO of Skylogic Research, who recently released an 88-page report titled, "2017 Drone Market Sector Report". Colin's report shows proves things that we already knew, like DJI having 72% global market share on drone sales, but also shows surprising developments, like the vast majority of all people (68%) who purchase drones above 250 grams intend to use those drones for some kind of professional (commercial) use. Ian and Colin discuss these facts and much more from the latest Skylogic Research report.