Switzerland: Welcome to the Drone Valley
swissinfo.ch
swissinfo.ch
But for less than $300, you can build a small 6" quadcopter from base parts, purchase a small control radio, and a pair of inexpensive FPV goggles+transmitter+receiver. Yeah, less than $300. China's amazing at this.
If you get a permit for it in the US (or ignore the law), $50 more gets you radios with miles of range. Your primary limit will be batteries (solutions exist, but bust the budget a bit, fixed wing drones are a lot of more economical here).
But there is nothing magical or special about Switzerland other than a concentration of interest. If you wanted, you could start competing with these folks and stand up in front of a shady incubator looking for your economic kickstart really, really fast. You don't need to fabricate parts to build prototypes and most of this stuff is mass produced.
I'm by far an amateur, and don't really have enough sim hours to fly the drone I'm just about done assembling.
But: the aerial camera gimbal is by far the hardest part to get right, and why vendors like DJI charge what they charge. Software exists to make it work, though.
The advantage to building your own is that you get a different type of quad -- a racing quad which feels more like flying a porsche (feels like a race car) than an mini-van (e.g. mavic, reliable but super fun to fly).
If you want to build a racer, rctimer has some of the best kits (high quality parts, well thought out design). Here's an old build guide from my blog, you would want to get a newer kit with an omnibus-based flight controller, but the idea is the same: https://nathan.vertile.com/blog/2016/04/24/rctimer-u210-mini...
Also, if you're just learning to fly, you probably want to learn acro/rate mode (which is full manual mode) on something smaller first, like this maybe: https://nathan.vertile.com/blog/2017/03/31/betaflight-micro-...
But the prices aren't just affecting the floor models. DJI's had to move into the $300 range (I literally just bought one) because of steep competition in small shops making custom drones and other vendors pushing the cost down as various manufacturing houses spin up.
You could say similar things about Silicon Valley. And yet most people agree that it’s a super important place for all tech stuff. So it seems to be a very relevant factor.
It's no accident that the Valley is next to a group of strong universities.
The more common form of Amateur TV is SSTV[0] - Slow-scan TV. This runs in 3kHz (!!!) of bandwidth and typically gets transmitted on voice frequencies, since it can fit inside the max occupied bandwidth there. People transmit this on the HF bands, which can go world-wide! But... for FPV-purposes, it's pretty much useless. You're looking at something like 8-114 seconds/frame.
But I had no idea that there's people doing Amateur fast-scan TV[1]. That's pretty cool too! I have no idea how readily available light and portable equipment would be for the 70cm or 33cm bands, but there is a bunch of equipment available for the 23cm (1.2GHz) band. As mentioned in my sibling comment... it's not necessarily legal equipment, and it's kind of just... available... from random distributors in China, but it works OK and you're not all that likely to have someone complain about it in that band, unless you happen to be interfering with their attempts to do the same thing :)
I kind of want to pull out that cheap Chinese analog FPV camera too and see how disgusting the spectrum on it is. I have pretty low expectations (camera + tx + rx for $20? yeesh...)
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And I suspect the reason the people on long range UHF do so within spec is because, in my experience anyway, the ham guys get more and more grumpy as you go down in frequency. That video transmitter above operates in the 1.2GHz/23cm band, and no one (around here at least) seems to particularly care too much about it. Going downwards, the UHF (440MHz/70cm) band and the VHF (146MHz/2m) band are used pretty frequently for voice communication, so someone splatting all over the band would have people enraged. Going lower into the HF (<30MHz) bands, you've got people worldwide using those for communication, and they're more than happy to get the FCC or Industry Canada or whatever your local regulatory body is on your ass for breaking the rules.
https://www.modelaircraft.org/sites/default/files/590.pdf
Part 97 rules:
§ 97.215 Telecommand of model craft. An amateur station transmitting signals to control a model craft may be operated as follows: (a) The station identification procedure is not required for transmissions directed only to the model craft, provided that a label indicating the station call sign and the station licensee's name and address is affixed to the station transmitter. (b) The control signals are not considered codes or ciphers intended to obscure the meaning of the communication. (c) The transmitter power must not exceed 1 W.
They call video tech for model aircraft First Person View
FPV Transmitter:
https://hobbywireless.com/12-13-ghz-transmitters-c-179_117_1...
And an example of experimental Digital ATV using 6MHz bandwidth (needs miniaturization to be practical):
https://stationproject.blog/2016/02/19/a-new-project-digital...
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To @KirinDave point, yes this technology is available and you can start working on Drones now, the Drone community is very welcoming, I think its a side effect of having to apply technology from other communities, like computer vision.
That is called clustering, and it is very, very hard to build and disrupt. It took Silicon Valley almost 100 years to build its own.
Why do you think Switzerland is such a global leader in precision machinery and manufacturing? Yep, 150 years of watchmaking.
You don't make that up out of nowhere.
In Sweden Markus Persson who made Minecraft used to work at King. Jacob de Geer of iZettle was the first employee at TradeDoubler, which was founded by Martin Lorentzon who would later be a founder of Spotify. Daniel Ek of Spotify used to work at another gaming company and of course the music industry is large in general. Zennström who started Skype used to work at Tele2, a telecom operator. Klarna was started with help from people from Bluetail, which used Erlang in turn made by Ericsson. Etc. Etc. (This is just off the top of my head and all these companies had large exits or were already established).
That is what a successful cluster is and what makes them hard to replicate. Without this dynamic it is just a bunch of companies next to each other. So why doesn't Switzerland seem to have that?
Why do you think IBM, Disney, Google all have massive research centers in Switzerland? Or why Switzerland is one of the world leaders in research?
Your argument is "I don't know about it, therefore it doesn't exist". It only proves that you don't know about it, nothing else.
> You seem to think that technology equals "venture capital that shows up in the tech news".
The companies I mentioned all have had great real success. They have hired thousands and thousands of people and ended up selling for billions. This "drone valley" is exactly the "venture capital in the news" that you are talking about.
> you don't seem to know much about Switzerland as well.
Why wouldn't I know about Switzerland? We have already established that Switzerland has a great reputation and good conditions. Sweden and Switzerland have a lot of industries in common. Like pharmaceuticals, construction, chemicals and automation. The Google office is well know as is banking, watches and other large brands. ABB is even Swiss-Swedish and of course Kamprad used to live there. And yes, I have been to Switzerland. At least a half a dozen time over two decades and more counting stopovers in Zürich mainly going back from Hong Kong.
This just doesn't have much to do with the topic at hand. Many places have great technology, but fail to break into new areas. Which is what I have been saying that Sweden is probably worse on papper yet far more successful in this regard.
> Or why Switzerland is one of the world leaders in research?
Because of good schools, high salaries and dedicated people. Which is perfect for people who want to have a good career. Not necessarily for starting successful companies in new industries. If you haven't noticed it is rarely "the best" people who start startups. They have too much to loose. It is the restless, the dropouts, the migrants etc. If you read my previous comments you can see that I am pretty bearish about Sweden's future for startups as well.
My question is simple and I have asked it repeatedly i.e. what indicates that this "drone valley" will go anywhere? Don't blame me if you can't come up with an answer.
All of those are drones for professional applications, not for hobbyists. That market is pretty much cornered: wants nice videos/pictures -> DJI, a racing quad or just to pilot -> go custom/cheap Chinese.
In all of those cases, the value is either in software/product behind the drone where the hardware is just a platform, or something quite custom for a specific application. As you said, you can't compete with the Chinese for generic hardware, as Intel, Parrot and others discovered.
Quads just have the ability to hover, which is desirable in a lot of industrial applications. They're also a nice example here because they have the most expensive avionics software and hardware (clock speeds have hard minimums) and THEY are cheap.
This matters for us in particular because SAR can happen literally anywhere, not just in restricted airspace around cities or airports. We really do operate at less that 100 feet. We have landed in hospital parking lots. No notice on the ground. Just suddenly a huge helicopter is parking itself beside all the SUVs. That's what emergency means. So a large number of metal drones is a real safety issue.
Or, we can do it in a manner similar to aviation. State and local governments have no say. FAA rules govern aviation, with preemption making sure those rules are not complicated by local authorities. Our helicopters cover a huge area during normal operations. During cross-country transfers to things like airshows they operate across the entire continent. Local, even state, rules won't be welcome. It all has to come from the FAA.
Even if there are some locations that accept innovative experimentation with drones (e.g. Switzerland or Japan), the majority of countries (e.g. the USA with part 107) are quite restrictive. Because of severe restriction on autonomy, all large-scale applications are not legal.
Not many people are investing time and money into building new drone applications, as it's uncertain it will be legal in the near future. Without serious $ behind it, drone regulations will probably stay restrictive. If you are thinking about Amazon - I heard from multiple people that last-mile delivery is actually more feasible with ground robots.
E.g. the agricultural sector in the US has enormous power on this front. They already use lots of drones as well as e.g. helicopters to dry cherry trees, crop dusting planes, etc. That business is quite expensive and an obvious target for replacement by drones. When technology gets to the point where legislation is the only real obstacle, there will be lots of pressure for legislation to change. I'd say that's a question of when not if.
What will need to happen on the safety front is for drones to play nice with regulated airspace and controllers/pilots in the area. Mostly drones currently don't have stuff like ADS-B or transponders on board. Given how cheap and light stuff like that is getting, I think it's a matter of time before there will be some drone specific versions of that that allow controllers to monitor any drone activity in their area. I imagine stuff like that won't be optional for any commercial operations. Mostly drones are a danger only because they stray in the path of other planes. If there's collision warnings, controller advisories, etc. things get a lot safer.
There is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. As long as there is a restriction of a single drone per pilot, using airplanes and helicopters tends to be cheaper for most use cases.
So, the only effect of this legislation will be that likely successful companies in this space may not necessarily end up being US based companies and that the US will end up being late to the game. That in itself might be enough incentive for this to get fixed sooner than later.
In the same way, self driving cars are being invested in despite legal obstacles that currently make operating them illegal in most places.
From discussion with a number of drone service providers, it seems to me the restrictiveness really depends on the context.
For things involving flying a drone over a crowded area, it's definitely hard to get authorization and we've seen projects being abandoned because of that. So yeah, drone delivery in cities might take some time before it is allowed.
On the other hand, most of the commercial applications I've seen are around using drones for mapping. So basically taking pictures and then processing them (create orthophotos, build a 3D model, detect objects, etc...). This usually doesn't involve flying over crowd and for a number of use cases (farms, construction site, security) the fly would be over a private property. A lot of people are able to do this without any legal restrictions.
From what I know of the history of the swiss Drone Valley, the two biggest success are sensefly [2] and Pix4D [3] and those are in the mapping business. Two of the booming startups would be wingtra [4] and flyability [5]. Wingtra seems to be mapping-oriented as well and Flyability develop drones that can fly inside. So a lot of the swiss drone valley is really into drones that can take pictures for mapping & inspection and I think this segment will continue to see massive growth in the future.
[1] https://www.picterra.ch/ [2] https://www.sensefly.com/ [3] https://pix4d.com [4] https://wingtra.com/ [5] https://www.flyability.com/
In my opinion, the majority of those applications are better served by either CCTV or manned aircraft.
Mapping use cases - If the area is big enough, manned aircraft mapping is much cheaper than drone mapping. Typical airplane ortho is around the 10cm/pixel, so it is sufficient for the majority of use cases. E.g. Check our nearmap. If the area is small, the machine learning is not going to make lots of $, as it's better to just use humans.
Monitoring use cases - e.g. "I want to detect if construction workers are wearing helmets" or "I want to detect poachers in the area". You can provide more business value by doing computer vision on CCTV camera.
Even if only one country in the world encourages these kinds of autonomy, isn’t that adequate for the development phase of the tech?
If, say, India permits autonomous drones broadly...
1) That market alone can sustain all the research and initial marketing to sustain the industry to where there are mature product offerings.
2) Once there are mature product offerings, then any country that allows them will put their citizens at a competitive advantage.
3) Since permission is more easily granted than revoked, that advantage will spread faster than it contracts.
4) At some point there is a tipping point where money is clearly left on the table in banning countries, and the bans become a clear disadvantage.
5) Autonomy is permitted in all but a few markets.
I honestly don’t even see how that process would even slow growth, let alone halt it.
People act like these technologies are ready-to-roll and regulation is an impediment, but it seems like regulators can move pretty slow and still be fairly close to the growth curve the development and marketing timeline is capable of.
Switzerland is clearly a startup hub for B2B companies and high/deep tech. I guess, with only 8 million citizens, we can't go B2C and don't have any chance to compete internationally other than "improving" B2B. Especially recently Swiss firms invested a ton into automation after the "Frankenshock", a day in February 2015 when the Swiss Franc appreciated by 15% to the Euro overnight and hence endangered exports on which we rely on.
(Content marketing: If you are a software engineer with a EU-memberstate citizenship, and want to move here, there are many interesting, well-paid coding jobs in Zurich. Ping me at iwan@coderfit.com, if you want to get more info.)
>"In fact, there is a flourishing startup scene in the Drone Valley – the stretch of land between EPFL and ETH Zurich."
I've been to ETH Zurich but I am not familiar with EPFL? Could someone say where/what this is?
Besides the mentioned drone development is there much other tech and start up activity in and around Lausanne? I feel like Zurich seems to get most of the attention for tech in Switzerland.
Notably, major online retailers trialed same-day delivery (usually via bike messenger) within major urban regions (e.g. Zurich) for a moderate charge. Customers generally agreed that it was a great option, but no one used it, so it got canned.
- noise
- air flow
- airborne transport is not energy efficient
- malfunctioning drone can cause a lot of damage
I see drones as cheaper helicopters. I doubt they will be used for mainstream transportation or delivery system.