Opportunities in Aerial Robotics 2014+
By Craig Issod
ccc Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

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Overview
The author believes that aerial robotics is a burgeoning new field with numerous opportunities. However, overestimating the market may cause a classic “bubble” in these companies as the buzz around the industry grows. As with other budding technologies, the vast majority of companies entering this field will fail. This is especially true with aerial robotics as much of hardware is produced by large commodity manufacturers (intel, etc.). Also, much of the software is open source – which means there is unlikely to be a “Microsoft of the drone biz”.

On the positive end, it appears that the use of aerial robots is only limited by our imagination – technology has already produced most of the parts and will move forward much quicker than the total integration of any particular package(s). To the uninitiated, I like to explain it as follows. The real nerds among us have been pining for the “robotic revolution” for 30-40 years, but vast barriers have always stood in their way. As an example, look at the products from the robotic leader – Boston Dynamics:
http://www.bostondynamics.com/ [Read more…]