Payload data is an important and overlooked part of the drone industry. Data is what matters to the end user; they want to get information from the drone to the office and use it to do something useful, as fast as possible.
The drone industry was built on open source and open source communities are good at coalescing around one core problem. In our case, it’s keeping the drone in the air and improving flight performance. If you work on the drone code or hardware itself, you can do flight tests, improve flight performance, and dream up crazy vehicles with more or different propellers and wings. The infrastructure pieces, like data transfer, are less visible and less fun to work on.
As a consequence, the state of the art in the drone industry for payload data is SD cards.
At some point, cell phones had SD cards and users had to transfer their photos from the SD card to their computer manually—that’s where we are right now with drones and this data-collection bottleneck has been a pain point for a long time.
When you take a photo with your smartphone now, it’s automatically on your computer and the browser. Why would you take something out of your cell phone? It’s connected!
Now, that’s what Auterion is doing for drones. We’re reimagining how an end operator/user in this industry is capturing data. They should not have to think about it or do it manually.
At Auterion, a drone is a connected, smart device and the payload data is automatically sent to the cloud in real-time. From there, users can pull the data from the drone with a simple API call and more importantly—without a manual step. We are nearing the death of SD cards in the drone industry.
Not only that, but everything fits into one workflow. All the drones and payloads work together and send data to the Auterion Suite. Drones are online, all the time (if you want them to be), and the data compilation and analysis can be done on the drone with AI Node. This means a greater ability to collect and analyze data and transfer it over LTE.
Live Chat
Watch the live chat on the topic between Romeo Durscher and Lorenz Meier.
Up Next
To learn more read the two previous posts about MAVLink and Enterprise PX4.