Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise



Nathan Mattise















Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise



Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise



Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise

Nathan Mattise







NEW ORLEANS—If you need evidence that drones are big business, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's (AUVSI) Xponential conference is a good start. The event filled a much more modest space in Washington DC three years ago, but back then the event felt more defense-focused. In contrast, this year's edition filled four of the vast halls of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and had all the trappings of a big tech conference. Keynotes were supplied by Amazon Vice President Gur Kimchi and Cisco's retired CEO John Chambers (complete with the requisite "hockey stick" growth slides), and vendors hawked cloud platforms and professional services alongside the expected collection of flying, swimming, rolling, and crawling robots.

Cloud connection to drones is gaining increasing attention because of the massive amount of data that uncrewed vehicles can collect. Optical and multi-spectral imagery, 3D laser mapping, and any number of other geospatial datapoints have to be stored, processed, and routed to the people who need them. As such, representatives from oil and gas companies, utilities, insurers, civil engineers, and a host of other industries stalked the floor at Xponential in search of systems that would let them inspect assets from a distance.

A lot of the action currently sits in a holding pattern, however. Due to current Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations, only a few of those industries have begun using uncrewed vehicles en masse. One of the most well-established current applications of drones outside the military is "precision agriculture," in which UAVs equipped with near-infrared and other sensors detect problems with crop health in high resolution. This data is subsequently used by automated, GPS-controlled chemical applicators. But while drones have been used in precision agriculture in Japan and other countries for over a decade, many US farmers using drones to pinpoint where crops need to be fed or sprayed are "cowboys," as one drone manufacturer described them. The nickname isn't because they raise cattle; it's because they flaunt the FAA's rules.

Some of the autonomous flying systems at Xponential were designed to use 3G or LTE wireless signals to push the data they collect directly into the cloud. But again because of FAA restrictions, most of the companies forging ahead with systems capable of flying well outside of the operator's line of sight are based outside of the US. Kimchi revealed this is why Amazon conducts most of its Prime Air delivery drone trials in England rather than in the US. Despite concerns about drones flying near airports, the British government has been more open to commercial drone testing.

While a number of non-military US companies showed off their technologies at Xponential, the market for autonomous and remotely piloted vehicles here is still dominated by the military. Most of the hardware brought by Lockheed Martin, Oshkosh Defense, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Textron, L3, Aerovironment, and Stark Aerospace (a unit of the American subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries) was military-focused. On the other hand, most of the companies that focused on industrial customers were from Europe and Asia. Notable exceptions included Airware (the drone software platform company for which John Chambers now holds a board seat) and Uvionix (a company with a new drone designed for delivering lightweight cargo like fast food, coffee, and pharmaceuticals).

A handful of the items that caught our eye are pictured above. Xponential looks to only grow from here, so expect an even larger array of unmanned tech for Dallas in 2017.Still, the lingering feeling we got from this year's event was that of concern. Many attendees expressed worry that by the time the FAA and the US government sorts out drone regulation, it will be hard for US companies to compete with innovation from elsewhere.

Listing image by Nathan Mattise