4Scight is better than hindsight: A decade of autonomous electric VTOL UAV development and commercialization
When I started developing electric quadrotors a decade ago, “low-cost” gyro sensors to stabilize each axis were the size of a lego brick and so temperature sensitive that direct sunlight could cause the aircraft to drift out of control. Therefore I spent a lot of my early development efforts optimizing fixed point arithmetic filters on 8-bit microcontrollers to tolerate the inaccuracy of those sensors and keep my quadrotors from flipping over, let alone accurately holding position.
Fast forward 10 years and we’re now integrating triple axis gyros, accelerometers, magnetometers and barometric pressure sensors on chips smaller than your pinky finger nail, costing only a few dollars each and are more precise than $10k military grade IMUs of last decade. We’ve got 2 GHz octo-core processors that don’t even need active cooling, as well as credit card size triple constellation dual band GNSS modules giving our autonomous aircraft centimeter level position accuracy!
While the technology and applications have come a long way, the regulations and public awareness of autonomous drones have lagged. In this talk I’ll be covering the technology advances, practical applications, regulatory challenges and the shift in public perception of autonomous drones over the last decade.