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Where is the US or EU competitor to DJI? They are running away with it. Oh right, we instead pioneered regulation and legislation, all those deaths from drones

Where is the US or EU competitor to DJI? They are running away with it. Oh right, we instead pioneered regulation and legislation, all those deaths from drones falling down and drones hitting planes.

asynchronous 3y ago
Really telling when all the drone deaths thus far have been from DJI drones being weaponized in the Ukraine-Russia war.
rad_gruchalski 3y ago
Furthermore, their drones comply with our registration.
ceejayoz 3y ago
Do it before someone dies: "Regulation out of control!" Do it after someone dies: "Why didn't you do anything?!" It's not insane to get out in front of drone regulation; their numbers are likely to continue to increase. Lack of regulation certainly isn't DJI's advantage; they still have to comply with it to sell their product in a whole bunch of major markets. That's the exact reason this drone weighs 249 grams.
- dopamean 3y ago
  > It's not insane to get out in front of drone regulation Nor is it surprising. There are a lot of regulations around aviation (though perhaps not as many as there are in other places) and safety is the reason. Every flying object in the sky is sharing the space with commercial airliners, hobbyist pilots, logistics companies, government aircraft, etc. All of which share the same regulations or have specific ones depending on the industry. It makes sense that drones would be regulated as well.
- yetanotherloser 3y ago
  Solution: stop saying "why didn't you do anything", righteously slap people who do.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    No. Sometimes "you should have anticipated this would be a problem" is the appropriate response. I don't subscribe to the idea that government should be exclusively reactive to things.
    - yetanotherloser 3y ago
      The problem isn't that, it's governments being excessively reactive to things. In their view few people dying of random mishaps is always an excuse for more government. In my view everybody dies of something and faced with the threat of a 251g drone to the skull vs the horror of everyone pickled in aspic under maximum government insanity just to preserve me long enough enough into decrepitude that the medics get to torment me properly before death, bring on the drone. A society where people aren't free to die of ordinary mishaps is a sick society.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        I mean, it's not free, but flying a drone under 55 pounds for personal use requires a $5 registration fee in the US. I'm pretty comfortable with that level of "pickling".
- Nition 3y ago
  "Under" 249g. They never say how much it actually weighs, like they do for the larger model.
- petsfed 3y ago
  And anyway, I get the impression the real reason we went so hard on drone regulation was that it thought it'd be easier to make unlicensed drones illegal than it was to investigate every time somebody shot a drone out of the sky. That violations of the anti-anti-aircraft-artillery laws haven't risen commensurate with drone usage really speaks highly of the general populace (although there are a fair number of news stories surrounding incredibly dumb people shooting down drones)
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  I think there's plenty of room to criticize the degree of regulation, while accepting the need for baseline rules. See the other reply upthread with respect to line of sight ("You're not allowed to use binoculars.") If true, that's stupid and unnecessary.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Why is it stupid and unnecessary? Binoculars give you a very narrow view, limiting situational awareness; the whole point of the line-of-sight rule is so you know what obstacles are near it. Same reason sniper teams like to have someone on overwatch who isn’t zoomed into a target.
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      I either trust the judgement of someone who's out there flying a drone with binoculars, or I don't. If I do, I DGAF if they're using binoculars. If I don't, it's my opinion that they have no business flying a drone to begin with. But it's also safe to say that someone who is reckless with a drone and a pair of binoculars doesn't GAF about my opinion... or the FAA's. In reality, rules this stupid simply get ignored with impunity. Which is fine by me.
RandallBrown 3y ago
GoPro tried and failed, but I don't think regulation and legislation were the reason.
- ben7799 3y ago
  GoPro has never had the hard core engineering culture/background to compete with a company like DJI. GoPro started IIRC as a company that just branded cameras they ordered from overseas.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
zeusk 3y ago
Anduril I guess? but they're exclusively focusing on the military applications. What about zipline? There's also some other startups focusing more on use of drones rather than building drones from ground-up.
alsodumb 3y ago
US competitor to DJI in what? Consumer marker or technology? If it's consumer marker where less cost matters a lot, there won't be a US competitor. DJI has home-turf, scale, and first mover advantage there, and a US competitor can maaybe match DJI in price. In technology/autonomy? Skydio beat them years ago (https://www.skydio.com/ https://www.skydio.com/). They launched as a consumer drone but I guess recently realized how consumer market in west isn't as profitable as enterprise/defense market so they shut down their consumer division. Skydio founders were pioneers in autonomous aerial vehicles, and it's not surprising they beat everyone else in autonomy. When they launched their first drone a few years ago, they were doing outdoor vision based autonomy for drone using on board compute only - it's an insanely hard problem, especially when you want to do in reliably in a product and not in a lab setting for nice videos. They did it and blew everyone away. DJI fan boys will say 'oh but DJI had autonomy too'. No they didn't, at best they had feedback based obstacle avoidance. I often tell my friends, one of my biggest regret was not signing up for an internship at Skydio back in 2018. They came to UIUC for recruiting, and they didn't realize their product yet. Back then I was a dumb first year grad student, I didn't check the founders background, and naively thought it was yet another dumb drone company trying to get some VC money by pitching something they'd obviously fail it. I've never been so wrong.
- bri3d 3y ago
  > I guess recently realized how consumer market in west isn't as profitable as enterprise/defense market so they shut down their consumer division. Subsidies and regulation played a major role here, although probably not the same kinds the parent post is whining about. The US government and enterprise market requires drones which are compatible with US Federal requirements ("Blue UAS") as well as state-by-state bans on DJI drones. It's a lot easier to compete in a space where your primary competition is being made illegal.
- brindlejim 3y ago
  Fwiw, Skydio is failing in Ukraine, where Russia's electronic warfare downs its drones. Their "vision-based autonomy" has severe limits, because GPS jamming can fell them.
- palata 3y ago
adolph 3y ago
It isn't clear to me that there is a reason for a US competitor to exist in the pro-sumer market. There are plenty of US firms selling their own parts/BNF kits for the hobbyist market and plenty doing commercial.
ipsum2 3y ago
You can replace DJI with any other consumer electronics manufacturer. It's hard to compete with China's vertical integration + cheaper labor. Skydio (Californian startup) used to manufacture consumer drones but recently exited that business to focus on enterprise, probably because of the higher margins.
- Johanx64 3y ago
  DJI is particularly hard to compete with, because it is a very reputable and highly sought after company to work for and thus gets the brightest Chinese engineers on top of everything else you mentioned
mschuster91 3y ago
There are numerous people and companies dealing with self-build kits, there is an active open source scene for literally everything around drones. There used to be an US-designed mass market drone, GoPro's Karma (which I happen to own and, somewhat regularly, fly), but well, GoPro suffered from financial issues back then, and couldn't afford competing with DJI.
mitthrowaway2 3y ago
I think it's less to do with regulation, and more to do with China acquiring most of the production capacity for the necessary components. Makes it easier to move quickly and iterate when the vendors are right there and speak your language.
0xDEF 3y ago
The moment DJI really took off from the competition is when they began using high-end cameras and optics. DJI is a video camera company that happens to put the cameras on drones.
- palata 3y ago
  Not what I saw at all. I saw them take off with their shitty camera on the Phantom 2 Vision+. They had really good consumer drones long before they started having really good cameras. Then they bought e.g. Hasselblad.
palata 3y ago
> Oh right, we instead pioneered regulation and legislation To be honest, we were far, far behind DJI waaaaay before we started talking about regulation and legislation. And since then we have not really been catching up at all.
VerminOctopus1 3y ago
The US doesn’t have the engineering talent to pull off what DJI has.

Where is the US or EU competitor to DJI? They are running away with it. Oh right, we instead pioneered regulation and legislation, all those deaths from drones falling down and drones hitting planes.

asynchronous 3y ago

Really telling when all the drone deaths thus far have been from DJI drones being weaponized in the Ukraine-Russia war.

rad_gruchalski 3y ago

Furthermore, their drones comply with our registration.

ceejayoz 3y ago

Do it before someone dies: "Regulation out of control!" Do it after someone dies: "Why didn't you do anything?!" It's not insane to get out in front of drone regulation; their numbers are likely to continue to increase. Lack of regulation certainly isn't DJI's advantage; they still have to comply with it to sell their product in a whole bunch of major markets. That's the exact reason this drone weighs 249 grams.

dopamean 3y ago
> It's not insane to get out in front of drone regulation Nor is it surprising. There are a lot of regulations around aviation (though perhaps not as many as there are in other places) and safety is the reason. Every flying object in the sky is sharing the space with commercial airliners, hobbyist pilots, logistics companies, government aircraft, etc. All of which share the same regulations or have specific ones depending on the industry. It makes sense that drones would be regulated as well.
yetanotherloser 3y ago
Solution: stop saying "why didn't you do anything", righteously slap people who do.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  No. Sometimes "you should have anticipated this would be a problem" is the appropriate response. I don't subscribe to the idea that government should be exclusively reactive to things.
  - yetanotherloser 3y ago
    The problem isn't that, it's governments being excessively reactive to things. In their view few people dying of random mishaps is always an excuse for more government. In my view everybody dies of something and faced with the threat of a 251g drone to the skull vs the horror of everyone pickled in aspic under maximum government insanity just to preserve me long enough enough into decrepitude that the medics get to torment me properly before death, bring on the drone. A society where people aren't free to die of ordinary mishaps is a sick society.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      I mean, it's not free, but flying a drone under 55 pounds for personal use requires a $5 registration fee in the US. I'm pretty comfortable with that level of "pickling".
Nition 3y ago
"Under" 249g. They never say how much it actually weighs, like they do for the larger model.
petsfed 3y ago
And anyway, I get the impression the real reason we went so hard on drone regulation was that it thought it'd be easier to make unlicensed drones illegal than it was to investigate every time somebody shot a drone out of the sky. That violations of the anti-anti-aircraft-artillery laws haven't risen commensurate with drone usage really speaks highly of the general populace (although there are a fair number of news stories surrounding incredibly dumb people shooting down drones)
CamperBob2 3y ago
I think there's plenty of room to criticize the degree of regulation, while accepting the need for baseline rules. See the other reply upthread with respect to line of sight ("You're not allowed to use binoculars.") If true, that's stupid and unnecessary.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Why is it stupid and unnecessary? Binoculars give you a very narrow view, limiting situational awareness; the whole point of the line-of-sight rule is so you know what obstacles are near it. Same reason sniper teams like to have someone on overwatch who isn’t zoomed into a target.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    I either trust the judgement of someone who's out there flying a drone with binoculars, or I don't. If I do, I DGAF if they're using binoculars. If I don't, it's my opinion that they have no business flying a drone to begin with. But it's also safe to say that someone who is reckless with a drone and a pair of binoculars doesn't GAF about my opinion... or the FAA's. In reality, rules this stupid simply get ignored with impunity. Which is fine by me.

RandallBrown 3y ago

GoPro tried and failed, but I don't think regulation and legislation were the reason.

ben7799 3y ago
GoPro has never had the hard core engineering culture/background to compete with a company like DJI. GoPro started IIRC as a company that just branded cameras they ordered from overseas.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

zeusk 3y ago

Anduril I guess? but they're exclusively focusing on the military applications. What about zipline? There's also some other startups focusing more on use of drones rather than building drones from ground-up.

alsodumb 3y ago

US competitor to DJI in what? Consumer marker or technology? If it's consumer marker where less cost matters a lot, there won't be a US competitor. DJI has home-turf, scale, and first mover advantage there, and a US competitor can maaybe match DJI in price. In technology/autonomy? Skydio beat them years ago (https://www.skydio.com/ https://www.skydio.com/). They launched as a consumer drone but I guess recently realized how consumer market in west isn't as profitable as enterprise/defense market so they shut down their consumer division. Skydio founders were pioneers in autonomous aerial vehicles, and it's not surprising they beat everyone else in autonomy. When they launched their first drone a few years ago, they were doing outdoor vision based autonomy for drone using on board compute only - it's an insanely hard problem, especially when you want to do in reliably in a product and not in a lab setting for nice videos. They did it and blew everyone away. DJI fan boys will say 'oh but DJI had autonomy too'. No they didn't, at best they had feedback based obstacle avoidance. I often tell my friends, one of my biggest regret was not signing up for an internship at Skydio back in 2018. They came to UIUC for recruiting, and they didn't realize their product yet. Back then I was a dumb first year grad student, I didn't check the founders background, and naively thought it was yet another dumb drone company trying to get some VC money by pitching something they'd obviously fail it. I've never been so wrong.

bri3d 3y ago
> I guess recently realized how consumer market in west isn't as profitable as enterprise/defense market so they shut down their consumer division. Subsidies and regulation played a major role here, although probably not the same kinds the parent post is whining about. The US government and enterprise market requires drones which are compatible with US Federal requirements ("Blue UAS") as well as state-by-state bans on DJI drones. It's a lot easier to compete in a space where your primary competition is being made illegal.
brindlejim 3y ago
Fwiw, Skydio is failing in Ukraine, where Russia's electronic warfare downs its drones. Their "vision-based autonomy" has severe limits, because GPS jamming can fell them.
palata 3y ago

adolph 3y ago

It isn't clear to me that there is a reason for a US competitor to exist in the pro-sumer market. There are plenty of US firms selling their own parts/BNF kits for the hobbyist market and plenty doing commercial.

ipsum2 3y ago

You can replace DJI with any other consumer electronics manufacturer. It's hard to compete with China's vertical integration + cheaper labor. Skydio (Californian startup) used to manufacture consumer drones but recently exited that business to focus on enterprise, probably because of the higher margins.

Johanx64 3y ago
DJI is particularly hard to compete with, because it is a very reputable and highly sought after company to work for and thus gets the brightest Chinese engineers on top of everything else you mentioned

mschuster91 3y ago

There are numerous people and companies dealing with self-build kits, there is an active open source scene for literally everything around drones. There used to be an US-designed mass market drone, GoPro's Karma (which I happen to own and, somewhat regularly, fly), but well, GoPro suffered from financial issues back then, and couldn't afford competing with DJI.

mitthrowaway2 3y ago

I think it's less to do with regulation, and more to do with China acquiring most of the production capacity for the necessary components. Makes it easier to move quickly and iterate when the vendors are right there and speak your language.

0xDEF 3y ago

The moment DJI really took off from the competition is when they began using high-end cameras and optics. DJI is a video camera company that happens to put the cameras on drones.

palata 3y ago
Not what I saw at all. I saw them take off with their shitty camera on the Phantom 2 Vision+. They had really good consumer drones long before they started having really good cameras. Then they bought e.g. Hasselblad.

palata 3y ago

> Oh right, we instead pioneered regulation and legislation To be honest, we were far, far behind DJI waaaaay before we started talking about regulation and legislation. And since then we have not really been catching up at all.

VerminOctopus1 3y ago

The US doesn’t have the engineering talent to pull off what DJI has.