This is the second installment of a 5 part series on the essential history, products, and competitive trends that are driving the explosive growth in the commercial drone industry. It’s content recently won the prestigious Quora knowledge prize and has contributed to articles from Forbes to CNBC.

DJI has largely defined and nearly cornered the consumer drone market. Let’s look at how and why.

(Full Story: Forbes’ Ryan Mac on DJI’s history)

In 2006, Frank Wang moved from prototyping drone autopilots in his dorm room to manufacturing and selling them in Shenzhen. Like Apple, DJI began by designing and manufacturing the technological building blocks (a.k.a. enabling hardware) for a market they would soon define.

Back to that ever-persistent question, “So what if the robot flies, what can I do with it?” Many people don’t understand why this question is important because they look at the consumer drone market as a collection of flying robots. To better understand this, you need to reframe how you view the market.

Try this: tell yourself that there are no drone companies. Stop imagining DJI, Parrot, and Yuneec as just selling drones. Parrot sells many things from headphones to navigation equipment. They also sell some great flying toys.

So what is DJI? They are currently a camera company. DJI sells a variety cutting-edge camera equipment, which in some instances happens to fly. “But,” you retort, “DJI has sold around $1B worth of quadcopters in 2015 and the Phantom often defines what most people think of when they reference a drone! How then, can they be a camera company?”

This brings us back to our initial question. The most obvious use for drones was slapping on a camera and collecting video from a previously inaccessible area or viewpoint. The problem was that for a drone to move around, the entire airframe (what we call an aircraft’s skin and chassis) needs to rotate in some way, angling thrust from the propellers and pushing the drone in the desired direction. Thus, every time you need the drone to move through space, you inadvertently change where the camera is facing because it is fixed to the airframe.

Drones and Gimbaled Sensors

The same people that created the Roomba are solving this with skewed propellers and clever control system design in the Cyphy Works LvL 1. A fantastic solution when flying in calm air, but largely ineffective when dealing with winds and intense accelerations

To finally get smooth video that actually captures our desired subject, we use a gyro-stabilized gimbal, a motorized camera-mounting device that measures how a body (the body of our drone in this case) is rotating, and then uses those measurements to calculate the exact opposite rotation. The motors immediately perform this opposite rotation, which causes the mounted camera to remain still. This system is what we refer to as a steadicam and the system's architecture is very similar to that of an autopilot.

The autopilot also measures how the drone body is rotating, but instead of calculating the opposite rotation, it calculates the rotation needed to be in a stable hover. So DJI, who is very good at making autopilots, finds they are also very good at making gyro-stabilized gimbals.

We now have all the ingredients for the Phantom 1 and a suitable answer to our question. The Phantom 1 was a huge catalyst for DJI and the aerial photography market because it was a ready to fly camera drone that actually took good pictures and video. Finally, people weren’t just flying robots around, they were creating value by capturing data, a big leap in the usefulness of drones. Notice I keep harping on value and utility because that’s what defines DJI as a camera company. At the end of the day, it does not matter that this robot left the ground, moved around, and then landed. What matters is the data it was able to collect and the value of that data to the user. This robot could capture video data that a real estate agent can use to advertise a property, multispectral data that shows crop health in a farm, or just a great drone selfie that you just want to watch over and over.

Now the explosive growth happens, but we haven’t quite said why. As it turns out, photo/video is THE use case for drones, and the Phantom is the first drone to do this well. Yes, drone delivery is exciting, but it’s still a ways off due to regulatory hurdles. Search & rescue, infrastructure/agriculture/insurance inspection, aerial cinematography/journalism, and aerial marketing are really just subcategories of photo/video. Did I mention the Phantom can tackle them all?

This marks the beginning of a trend we still see today: drones as a platform for software (more on this in part3). As we move through the Phantom 2, Inspire 1, and now the Phantom 3, DJI has consistently improved their product's ready-to-fly-ness, ensuring fewer fly-aways, better usability, and an easier and easier pilot learning curve. They accomplished all this on a ridiculous product release cycle while consistently undercutting competitors on price (See product comparison below).

That's all for now, but look out for part 3 where we look at the current state of DJI and their exciting new Phantom 4.

Next up in this series - Part 3: Is DJI and its Phantom 4 Unstoppable?

Other posts in this series:

Part 1: The Expert’s Guide to Drones - What You Need To Know for 2016

Part 4: Yuneec: A Dark Horse The Drone Industry Cannot Ignore

Part 5: Will The Lily Drone Meet Customer's Expectations?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Andy Putch is the co-founder of FreeSkies, a Bay Area software startup that is building the future of the drone UI/UX. Before FreeSkies, he was an autonomous systems researcher with the University of Illinois Bretl Research Group exploring emerging SLAM (LSD-SLAM) and other GPS-denied UAS control systems. He has also worked as an aerospace and defense corporate strategy consultant with Renaissance Strategic Advisors and as a NASA Aeronautics Academy Fellow at the Armstrong Flight Research Center. Andy is a private pilot, soon to be Section 333 UAS operator, and has been a featured speaker at drone conferences and trade shows.