Hacker News Reader

Comment by team_gold | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

View on HN

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).

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.

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

>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.

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.

Autel Nano or Lite+.

Some Autel drone are made in the USA, but not all.

Edit: added the Lite and fixed formatting

> Some Autel drone are made in the USA

You mean are assembled in USA. Most soft and hardware is still made in China.

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.

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...

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 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.

If you can do that at scale, it sounds like you have a viable business. There is clearly a demand for it.

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 :)

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

> 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?

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.

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?

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-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.

They competed until they were undercut, and then just didn't bother pursuing more profitable business instead. That is to say, if you can make a drone for $200, and DJI puts one out for $50, you don't really stand chance, so get out of the way and find more profitable businesses.

Anyways, DJI seems to just publish its revenue ($3.83b in 2021) but is it actually making money (profit, not revenue)? I'm not finding anything on Google. If they are selling each drone at a loss and just burning through VC still, that could be a huge problem.

> That is to say, if you can make a drone for $200, and DJI puts one out for $50, you don't really stand chance

The situation was more that western companies could make a drone for $1000, and DJI would make a significantly better drone for $500. Were they both $1000, the DJI drone would still clearly be better.

I am not praising DJI for free here. I just think that we need to face the truth. There is no way to improve with denial.

It's not like their drones run on Black Magic or Wizardry. Surely someone can just buy that $50 drone, take it apart, see what components they are using and how much their costs are, and start from there?

Yes, that's what we do!

But haven't we been saying this in the West forever: "the Chinese copy: they buy our products, take them apart, and just copy"?

Now we realize that they actually learned, and it was not straightforward. They are ahead in robotics, and we can't just "copy": we have to learn. And it takes time.

It isn’t clear they aren’t taking a loss on each of their drones. If they are, you c ant really copy it at the price point they are selling it for.

You keep commenting everywhere after ignoring what people are telling you:

Ignore the price, and the DJI drones are still way better. Even receiving a ton of money from the DoD, Western companies fail to compete with DJI greatly.

I think software and ecosystem is a big part of it, much more than just hardware

Drones weren't just a commodity to be farmed out to the lowest bidder, though. DJI had significantly better technology in addition to being cheaper. They had better transmitters (with the standalone controllers), redundant sensors, obstacle detection and avoidance, camera sensors and lenses, FLIR, flight time, range, wind correction, gimbals, FPV headsets... all of it. Each year they'd come up with some major innovation and iterate on all the other parts, while their competitors would stagnate for several years at a time between new models (which couldn't compete even at release). In any given year, DJI always seemed to have the advantage. They did all of that ON TOP of being cheaper.

You don't get to do that by simply undercutting your competitors. No, DJI handily won the drone wars by being cheaper AND better and constantly improving. They simply outcompeted.

I think we have a tendency to look down on Chinese manufacturers as copycats, but DJI is an exception to that rule. Their founder Frank Wang was basically a young college engineer who bootstrapped the whole consumer drone industry, worked ruthlessly hard, and stayed way ahead of his competitors, becoming Asia's youngest billionaire. Forbes story about him: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/05/06/dji-drones-f...

The Wikipedia article is also interesting and shows how ruthless and effective the company was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJI (for better or worse)

I mean, compare them to Lenovo, who's done nothing really new since they took over Thinkpads from IBM (except maybe folding convertibles). DJI is the polar opposite of that; they invented not only their own brand of drones, but pretty much created (and then dominated) the entire consumer drone market across the whole world.

If they were an American company, we'd be celebrating their success and Wang would be right up there next to Musk. DJI doesn't nearly get enough credit for the crazy amount of R&D they had to do to get the consumer drone industry to where it is today. Even if some of it is military trickle-down, that doesn't usually happen that quickly and cheaply. Even police & fire, who usually inherit those techs, tend to go with DJI, despite them not being US-made. IMO it's a shame that DJI happens to be caught up in the political turmoil of our times. Their products really are far above their peers. (And I don't even own any; sold my Phantom a decade ago.)

I don't know DJI's financials, but they've been around for nearly two decades by now. If they've been able to fool investors (or even the CCP) for that long while secretly losing money the whole time, well... guess they made a good business out of it? At least they made a useful product, compared to most of our shady ad-tech companies.

> I think we have a tendency to look down on Chinese manufacturers as copycats, but DJI is an exception to that rule.

Either they are an exception to the rule, or we under-estimate the work needed to make proper copycats.

Maybe we are just realizing that it takes a lot of work to learn what's needed to "copy", as we are trying to copy DJI ourselves.

DJI is just extremely good. It feels like we have been trying to copy them for 10 years, but they are still moving faster than we can catch up. It feels like the gap is getting bigger, sometimes...

I don't think many people look down on Chinese products as cheep knockoffs so much as government-sponsored strategic activities serving geopolitical functions. China has a well-documented history of government financial sponsorship of industry to dump and destroy foreign industry and establish industrial moats. This is how a lot of people view China nowadays.

> Western drone companies haven't bothered competing in the consumer space

This is factually wrong. Most drone companies have tried in the consumer space before pivoting towards the military. The military has been more and more present since around 2019, and most Western drone companies have pivoted to the military since Ukraine. Not because it's more profitable, but really because they failed in the consumer space.

Also the military makes it easier for Western companies because DJI cannot compete (obviously). But I am absolutely convinced that DJI is better at making military drones ("micro aerial vehicles") than the West.

Military is 100x more profitable than consumer. It isn’t clear they DJI is even making money since all I can find on a Google search is them bragging about revenue. If they made $3.83b in revenue in 2021, what were their expenses on that (or better yet, what is the break down of hardware/assembly costs vs. R&D costs if they aren't profitable yet)?

You do realize that the Western drone companies are failing at making good military drones, do you? Have you seen what Ukraine had to say about it?

I don't even want to talk about DJI not being profitable. That's preposterous. It's like if I was claiming that Apple is state-subsidized and not profitable.

Frankly, the DoD likely spent something like 5-8 trillion dollars over the last 10 years.

If we establish that drone manufacturing is a matter of national security, it seems critically important to understand why domestic production keeps failing and fix those problems rather than just giving up.

If it's a matter of national security, why would it be made available to the American consumer? They'd have more than enough business from the DoD, and wouldn't have to compete on price.

I guess there’s two possibly related questions. One, should military drones be available to consumers and two, why does price matter. On the first, you don’t have to make them available to consumers and probably shouldn’t for the highest end drones.

But B2C is a forcing function that pushes costs down. Military budgets aren’t infinite, and better manufacturing techniques mean more drones in a shorter period of time independent of cost.

I mean... 10 years of not being able to compete with companies subsided with a world powers national treasury isn't really saying much of anything

Just have a look at the money VCs and governments have thrown at Western drone companies before claiming it's a money problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com