Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Homegrown Drones: MAKE talks with Chris Anderson of 3DRobotics”.
All right, this is chris anderson from 3d robotics chris uh. First of all, thanks for helping put together what is our a cover model on our uh drones issue? Uh, i think it turned out beautifully. You’Ve got a fantastic team. That’S uh putting together some some really interesting pieces, but uh how’s how’s today been here at the uh.
The meetup. What’S uh, what’s to argue with we’re out in the sun, drones are flying. It’S it’s a beautiful day, yeah, so um iris came out uh just a little bit over a month ago. Actually it’s coming out on february 17th. Okay, so we had a developer release um earlier, but the consumer one’s coming out in less than a month. Okay, how excited are you about that so excited? This is like you know, we’ve been working on it for so long and you know tweaking and tweaking tweaking to finally get it out there.
I got to fly a test flight of it and i’m admittedly not a very good pilot, but um our at our meetup that we had a couple months back and um that thing flies really nicely. Thank you. The whole point of autonomy of real, auto pilots is that you don’t have to be a good pilot if you, oh, if you want just sort of switch into lawyer mode and it just kind of pops up, does one thing now you can think about the camera. Rather than the vehicle, but if you really want to fly it, then you just switch to another mode and off you go so what happens uh? This comes out um. You guys got to start working on um on. What’S next and uh, et cetera, we’ve just done our kind of migration from our our 8-bit platform, which is based on arduino to our 32-bit platform.
So that’s you know doing those kind of platform. Changes is uh, it’s a lot of work, but it opens up this huge amount of overhead in terms of a headroom. Rather in terms of the processing power.
The question is now: what are we going to do with it machine learning, artificial intelligence, image processing? You know more and more advanced software functions that make these things easier and easier to use so, and that’s one of the things that we’ve really been looking at in this magazine uh this issue, specifically the um. You know what what are the things that people have been doing to push the hobby in the next. The next steps there’s a certain point when you’ve flown enough times, and you need to do something more absolutely. I think we went from getting robots to fly to doing something with it um.
You know the first part was getting to fly and it was like soldering, irons and compilers. Then it was like making it easier to fly and i think that’s where we are right. Now then they’re carrying cameras, gopros and beyond, and then the next question is okay. How do i get epic video? You know how do i have like the director’s view without having to have a steven spielberg on hand and that and that our creative function, that are sort of you know, forget the vehicle. Just what is the camera, seeing what would be the perfect panning angle? How do i sort of you know press a button and get something that’s just gon na, be you know spectacular on youtube? I think that’s the next frontier for where we’re going now. Do you think? What’S the point where uh what happens where everyone says? I need one of those in my house or has that point already happened? My point has not happened right now.
I think you know anyone who’s seen. One says that looks cool looks like fun, etc. Most people think it looks hard, so we need to make it look easier. Make it be easier. I mean at the end of the day, you’ve got your camera and you just we we’ve been stuck to the third, you know to eye level for the entirety of human existence.
Um now we know we’re not stuck, we can put a camera, we can put our eyes anywhere, we want, but what’s the easy way i mean. If you were a director here, would you just sort of say go you would use your finger? Would you use your hand like this? Would you sort of you know, maybe use your phone and just do a pinch and zoom, and but you know the point is: is that is that putting cameras in the air is now something within reach of everybody? And now we can start to ask questions like what are they seeing? You know what what would be the hollywood you know shot here and how do i get that and how does software help me it’s exciting stuff to think about? You know the stuff that we’ve already hit uh is has blown my mind, uh in a lot of different ways and uh. It’S exciting. To think of you know the the next generation and what they start doing, and you know a meetup like today. I feel like there’s uh, some of the people that are working on some of those things already actively. So it’s what’s really exciting about it.
For me, you know, i think the two things most exciting for me are first, what people do creatively with it and that’s all making it easier to use more autonomous, etcetera and then the second is this, this platform, this ability to hack it to add features things. We’Ve never thought of that’s equally exciting and that’s you know, that’s one thing: we emphasize we’re an open platform. You know anybody can change it modify, it add features to it and i have no idea what they’re going to come up with i’d like them to just blow me away with some spectacular feature. That makes perfect sense and they did it. Not us and the nice thing is when they do it and they give it back to the community, then everybody gets it. Absolutely so. Legislation-Wise uh give me your dreams dream scenario: what happens in a couple years as everything starts getting written down and firmed up with signatures yeah well, today, we’re flying under the recreational exemptions under 400 feet, visual line of sight and that’s fine and the in the consumer. Consumers have led this in drone revolution to date in part because of these regulatory exemptions. Um there’s a process to allow commercial use, so today we’re not far from napa valley, the vineyards, etc.
These things could be doing crop surveys as well, but the you know, the legality of that in the united states is not yet well established. Um that’s been going slower, um than than people had hoped, um we’re kind of agnostic on this. For a couple reasons.
First of all, we’re happy with the consumer-led industry we’re happy to kind of put things in the hands of regular people so that, when the consumer use, the commercial use comes along that the platforms are just that much more sophisticated and easier to use. Secondly, there’s a big world out there. This is the united states, but you know in fact, most drones are used outside of the united states and they don’t have these same restrictions so um. I look i’d like the regulations to happen sooner rather than later, but in the meantime we can do so much in terms of advancing the technology that i’m not held back makes sense all right.
Well, thanks chris and uh, i’m watching you guys excitedly yeah keep up the good work. .