I don't think the operating system to connect the worlds drones is going to be closed source. 3DR and their open source base is going to give Airware a run for their money as the de facto standard "operating system for drones" in the consumer and more and more in the commercial space.<p>In the meantime people like Drone Deploy and Skycatch will fill the gap when it comes to data collection and processing which is where the real business is long term. Drones themselves will continue to become a commodity. Also, it's worth remembering that a Chinese company, DJI, has about 80Pct market share in the US for consumer and prosumer drones. Lots of competition for everyone.
I have more than 20 drones of different sizes, some of them are big.<p>I am never going to buy a drone that is not mine(closed source) when I could buy machines that are totally under my control.<p>Being closed source means the NSA could easily snoop what I do at every moment, in Europe, send the GPS coordinates, the telemetry, pictures and videos all the time without my consent.<p>US companies are becoming increasingly spies of the US gobertment all around the world, specially people that worked closely with Uncle Sam, like those guys from Airware.<p>I don't see Chinese or European companies buying into this, when they can tailor open source into their specific needs. We already do that, so it is not that complex thing to do.<p>I see this article as PR.
"That kind of stovepipe way of doing things isn't going to scale,"<p>It's amazing how many times this argument is made by proprietary systems people. In their world the web should have never happened.<p>The only chance they have is to use lots of VC money on certification bs that tries to lock out open source projects.<p>I smell PR as well.
Good luck. There's so much diversity in the equipment, payloads and use cases for these systems that it's incredibly difficult to standardize. Cutting integration costs has been a dream for many years, but previous standards introduced more complexity than they eliminated.
nah. It will be ardupilot (or another open source flight controller) on linux, and because it's on linux, you have access to all the other open source goodies you need for processing, analytics, connectivity etc.<p>It's already happening - check out <a href="http://emlid.com" rel="nofollow">http://emlid.com</a> or <a href="http://erlerobotics.com" rel="nofollow">http://erlerobotics.com</a> for boards you can use with Rpi2 or Beaglebone Black