In the previous few articles, we talked about increasing the performance of a drone video sensing platform. Specifically, we called out two factors: 1. Leverage the characteristics of aerial drone video to reduce the working set size from any capture to build a drone world catalog and 2. defer much of the processing to analytics from video/image processing for any workloads. Indeed, these assertions are grounded in facts such as continuous drone images have a lot of overlap and direction and pattern of flight has no relevance to how fast and comprehensive the drone world catalog is populated or to retrieve specifically detected objects with high precision and recall. Also, the better the drone world catalog or knowledge base, the more inclusive the platform becomes for more drone sensing applications both in terms of spatial and temporal dimensions with some of the work taken away from repeated video processing in favor of specific analytical queries.

This approach makes the drone video sensing platform more flexible, open and available to a diverse set of drone sensing applications. With the performance articulated design decisions favoring a trend that has traditionally worked for any kind of data management platforms, the platform can host and serve many applications from interested parties for reducing their overhead and allowing them to focus more on their business cases. There will always be competition from mature and deep pocket companies to own the vertical from video processing, analytics and end-user experience but the industry as such is relatively new and growing and more hardware vendors trying to write their own software rather than letting software provide a common denominator to allow them added value and focus on their upgrades in device capabilities. So while LLMs continue to fine-tuned and upgraded to handle much of the tasks upfront with classification, labeling and tracking, our bet is that the data rather than the re/processing is going to be more valuable and require the best practices sooner or later and planning for it upfront across devices, vendors and LLMs. In fact, even to reduce workload with say video indexing or to perform more analytics after the initial video processing, we do embrace AI models and allow drone sensing application developers to be more expressive in their queries than they could otherwise.

The requirements of drone sensing applications are going to be different from those of our platform by virtue of the specific business cases they target. The platform must consider increasing performance along each of these cases in a way that raises the bar for the platform as a common denominator across these applications. This calls a brief review of the various players in the industry today:

AeroVironment - top supplier to Defense - Arlington, VA

AmericanRobotics - fully automated - drone-in-a-box - Waltham, MA

AgEagle aerial systems - drone software for image analysis - Wichita, Kansas

Ascent Aerosystems - all weather UAVs - Wilmington, Massachusetts

Brinc drones - fly indoors beyond GPS range - Seattle, WA

Freefly Systems - high payload, filmography - Woodinville, WA

Harris Aerial - Endurance, long-range and payload - Orlando, FL

Hylio - autonomous swarm spraying for agriculture - Richmond, TX

Inspired Flight - modular, open-architecture drones for map/survey - San Luis Obispo, CA

RedCat+Teal+FlightWave - fast-deploy in dark or GPS-denied - Salt Lake City, Utah

Skydio - leader in autonomous flight, obstacle avoidance and hands-free operation - San Mateo, CA

SkyFish - 3D modeling of cell towers, bridges and power lines - Stevensville, Montana

Teledyne Flir - thermal imaging, cutting edge IR - Wilsonville, Oregon

Vantage Robotics - safest flights near crowds or stealth mission - San Leandro, California

As this list shows, companies are targeting differentiated use cases to provide viable commercial solutions and are subject to NDAA compliance or supply chain operations for their businesses. But as a software, the drone video sensing platform has the unique opportunity to serve all while with the best of purview, audit, aging and other best practices.