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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 https://ww

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 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.

Arrath 2y ago
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.
dji4321234 2y ago
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).
dchristian 2y ago
Autel Nano or Lite+. Some Autel drone are made in the USA, but not all. Edit: added the Lite and fixed formatting
- astromaniak 2y ago
  > Some Autel drone are made in the USA You mean are assembled in USA. Most soft and hardware is still made in China.
geepytee 2y ago
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.
- astromaniak 2y ago
  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...
  - Lord_Zero 2y ago
    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 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.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  If you can do that at scale, it sounds like you have a viable business. There is clearly a demand for it.
- team_gold 2y ago
  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 :)
cm2012 2y ago
The market will open up for new companies after the China ban takes effect. Right now they can't compete.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > 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?
- palata 2y ago
  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.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    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?
    - solardev 2y ago
      That didn't use to be true. There was once several Western consumer drone companies (3D Robotics, Parrot, GoPro, Intel, etc.) as recently as the mid-2010s. They gave up on the consumer space because DJI just totally ate their lunch, releasing better, cheaper drones year after year. I still remember how in any given year, the annual DJI drone releases would be smaller, cheaper, better, and fly longer than the other companies' drones (which were always a few years out of date) – AND they would have a whole range of consumer, prosumer, and professional drones and various kits and bundles for every market segment and price point. Nobody else could even remotely keep up. Here's one Western article with some background: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-26/dji-s-drone-supremacy-comes-at-a-price https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-26/dji-s-dro.... According to it, by 2020, DJI had 80% of the US consumer drone market. It discusses how DJI ruthlessly operated its business and crushed all of its competitors. Even a later startup, founded by Tesla engineers who wanted to build batteries right into the frame, didn't do so well and was soon acquired by another company. It's not that nobody bothered TRYING to compete with DJI. Everyone tried, both in the West and in China itself (e.g. Yuneec, Autel), but DJI beat them all. Their founder is basically the Chinese version of Musk. From that article: > A rather confounding issue Impossible has faced is that the purchase bids put up by police and fire departments often have specifications that guarantee the sales will go to DJI. To illustrate, Gore pulls up a request for proposal for a drone from the Kansas Highway Patrol that lists properties such as flight time, cameras, and payload capacities. The numbers match up exactly with those of DJI’s Matrice 210. “If the U.S. wants to be competitive in robotics and drones, the least it can do to jump-start its own industrial base is to award government contracts to American companies or at least let them compete for them,” Gore says. “There are about 1,000 police departments receiving DHS grant dollars and spending them on Chinese-made, DJI-made drones. We are using our federal dollars to fund what could become one of China’s first prime contractors.” [...] “DJI has incredible lobbyists,” Gore says.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
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.
- Breza 2y ago
  It's scary to think about what China could do with the $100 million-$150 million the US spends on a single F-35.
- hollerith 2y ago
  >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.

Arrath 2y ago

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.

dji4321234 2y ago

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).

dchristian 2y ago

Autel Nano or Lite+. Some Autel drone are made in the USA, but not all. Edit: added the Lite and fixed formatting

astromaniak 2y ago
> Some Autel drone are made in the USA You mean are assembled in USA. Most soft and hardware is still made in China.

geepytee 2y ago

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.

astromaniak 2y ago
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...
- Lord_Zero 2y ago
  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 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.
janalsncm 2y ago
If you can do that at scale, it sounds like you have a viable business. There is clearly a demand for it.
team_gold 2y ago
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 :)

cm2012 2y ago

The market will open up for new companies after the China ban takes effect. Right now they can't compete.

sofixa 2y ago
> 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?
palata 2y ago
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.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  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?
  - solardev 2y ago
    That didn't use to be true. There was once several Western consumer drone companies (3D Robotics, Parrot, GoPro, Intel, etc.) as recently as the mid-2010s. They gave up on the consumer space because DJI just totally ate their lunch, releasing better, cheaper drones year after year. I still remember how in any given year, the annual DJI drone releases would be smaller, cheaper, better, and fly longer than the other companies' drones (which were always a few years out of date) – AND they would have a whole range of consumer, prosumer, and professional drones and various kits and bundles for every market segment and price point. Nobody else could even remotely keep up. Here's one Western article with some background: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-26/dji-s-drone-supremacy-comes-at-a-price https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-26/dji-s-dro.... According to it, by 2020, DJI had 80% of the US consumer drone market. It discusses how DJI ruthlessly operated its business and crushed all of its competitors. Even a later startup, founded by Tesla engineers who wanted to build batteries right into the frame, didn't do so well and was soon acquired by another company. It's not that nobody bothered TRYING to compete with DJI. Everyone tried, both in the West and in China itself (e.g. Yuneec, Autel), but DJI beat them all. Their founder is basically the Chinese version of Musk. From that article: > A rather confounding issue Impossible has faced is that the purchase bids put up by police and fire departments often have specifications that guarantee the sales will go to DJI. To illustrate, Gore pulls up a request for proposal for a drone from the Kansas Highway Patrol that lists properties such as flight time, cameras, and payload capacities. The numbers match up exactly with those of DJI’s Matrice 210. “If the U.S. wants to be competitive in robotics and drones, the least it can do to jump-start its own industrial base is to award government contracts to American companies or at least let them compete for them,” Gore says. “There are about 1,000 police departments receiving DHS grant dollars and spending them on Chinese-made, DJI-made drones. We are using our federal dollars to fund what could become one of China’s first prime contractors.” [...] “DJI has incredible lobbyists,” Gore says.

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

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.

Breza 2y ago
It's scary to think about what China could do with the $100 million-$150 million the US spends on a single F-35.
hollerith 2y ago
>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.