Drones are flying high.
3D Robotics, started by kid genius Mexican engineer Jordi Muñoz, now 27, and Wired magazine visionary Chris Anderson, 52, just received $30 million in additional investor funding.
The company is expanding to 100 employees spread among current engineering headquarters on Convoy Court in San Diego, manufacturing facilities in Tijuana, and sales and marketing in Berkeley, with capacity expected to double.
3D Robotics makes domestic drones, little guys costing about $400 to $1,000, not the $15 million jobs made across town at General Atomics. But more 3D Iris quadcopters whir from Brazil to Britain, California to Iowa than all the frightening or heroic (depending on your viewpoint) military models cruising over Pakistan and Yemen.
The guts, how they essentially work, is essentially the same, however.
“Ours are not bulletproof,” says Muñoz, as he shows us around the big engineering room on Convoy Court. Muñoz is tall, soft-spoken, the son of a Baja psychiatrist and an accountant.
He holds up an octacopter. It looks like a three-foot water spider. The eight legs are stiff black metal with white propellers atop each end. The cigarette-pack-sized autopilot, or brain, sits in the middle surrounded by red and blue wires. The company’s top-selling $150 autopilots can turn any remote-control model airplane into a true autonomous drone.
Imagine a GoPro camera on this baby. (The new Iris sells for $979 with custom GoPro, $749 without.) Now programmed by your smartphone, the spider is cruising the surf off Ipanema (or Windansea in La Jolla), taking shots of the pros for far less than a surf photographer in the water could do it, or maybe filming French tourists in their bikinis, or ...
The practical Muñoz interrupts, “or medicine delivery, archeological inspection, construction, real estate, search and rescue, traffic monitoring, agriculture, border and home security, you name it.”
Anderson explains, “Our job as technologists is to create the platform and let the customer invent the use.”
We walk the San Diego factory — soon to be tripled in size and moved to Otay Mesa — but Anderson speaks by phone from the company’s converted brass factory warehouse in Berkeley. He’s testing a new model that, he says, should be ready by Thanksgiving.
Anderson talks twice as fast as Muñoz — and that is fast. “I don’t want to live a long time,” he says, “but I want to get a lot done in the time I have.” When he pauses, the thrum of little rotors comes through my iPhone.
“You can’t fly a drone over Berkeley,” Anderson says. Those are FAA rules. So Anderson is doing indoor testing. What fun! In America, drones must stay below a 400-foot ceiling, keep two miles away from any airport, and cannot be used for “commercial” purposes.
A farmer in the Central Valley or Iowa can have the drone check whether his fields need more anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, for instance, or whether the sprinkling system is functioning well, but a commercial drone company may not sell drone services to the farmer as a crop-dusting company might. Congress (good luck!) is set to review the rules in 2015, and this is why half of 3D Robotics’ sales come from abroad.
But what has made the drone revolution possible?
It’s the smartphone you hold in your hand.
Once smartphones in the millions and billions added GPS and accelerometers, “costs were democratized,” as Muñoz puts it.
I draw the analogy to computer graphics and gaming. A director of Google Earth once told me that when he worked for Silicon Graphics, only the CIA and the military could afford the technology. Once the chips made it to Xbox, and millions of gamers began to buy and play, the technology was — democratized.
What has made 3D Robotics possible itself is the cool partnership of Anderson and Muñoz. Anderson built his first drone out of Legos on the proverbial dining room table attempting to get his kids interested in science.
“I have an unfortunate tendency to commercialize my hobbies,” says Anderson, who once founded a successful company called GeekDadInc.
That drone is now in the Lego museum in Holland.
Anderson also knew a thing or two about selling and buying over the Internet, having written the best-selling book on the subject, “The Long Tail.”
He also knew more than a little about open-source communities and how the generation growing up on the Internet, like Muñoz’s, were used to getting everything for free, from music to movies, since he had written the book on that subject, too, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.” And, of course, his current book is called “The Makers: The New Industrial Revolution.”
So Anderson knew how to cast a clever net. He started a site called DIY Robotics, as in do-it-yourself, and the site soon aggregated an enthusiastic geek-horde of dronesters. Maybe they coded for Apple, maybe they day-jobbed for General Atomics, or — maybe one was a 19-year-old who seemed to know more about electronic engineering than most post-docs at Stanford. Anderson couldn’t guess how old Muñoz was or where he was really from any more than a World of Warcraft player knows who his teammates really are.
But that’s how they met.
It was like Jobs and Wozniak connecting over the Internet.
Muñoz built his first drone in a bout of boredom waiting for a green card. His mother gave him a remote-control helicopter, and he decided to make it autonomous. This took a week. A week with many crashes. But friends in the open-source community started bugging him, “Jordi, can you build me one?” He assembled 40 in his garage and sold them in one day over the Internet.
“I said, aah, this is a business,” Muñoz says. “This is actually interesting. Now I am actually making money.”
In the company’s first year, it did $250,000 worth of business. By the third year, 2011, it was $3 million.
The beauty of open-source development is that some of your best ideas and coding come from others for free, while at the same time 3D Robotics often publishes its diagrams and coding without patents in order to ramp up innovation by outside contributors. This sounds crazy to old-school patent attorneys but, Munoz says, “It destroys the Chinese cloners.”
Smartphones, open-source, Internet sales, short supply chain from Tijuana not Shanzhai, one partner who came up with drones in his garage and another who made them on his dining-room table out of Legos. The latter, don’t forget, is pretty much on a first-name basis with every game-changing inventor and venture capitalist in Northern California as the former editor-in-chief of Wired.
The drone future? Sci-fi for real is only 10 years away, Muñoz believes. Ball-drones will be able to fan out (“plate scanning”) and talk to each other not unlike the small drones in a movie Muñoz likes a lot, “Prometheus”: “Go here! No, the target’s there! Screw you, my batteries are down!” Sensors will be so good, drones will “see” walls, whereas now they can only be programmed to avoid obstacles the controller knows are there.
What’s to protect America from too much dronage?
“As soon as you give access to regular people, there’s something for everybody,” Muñoz says. “You’ve democratized the process. Regular people will be spying on regular people. Government will be spying on regular people. And regular people will be spying on the government.” To Muñoz, it’s like the medical system in the latest sci-fi movie “Elysium,” cancer-curing machines that start with the elite then inexorably move to the people. Sooner or later technology gets to everyone, protecting us all.
Let’s hope he’s right.
Like fracking, like genetic engineering, like ever-smarter smartphones and robots, the future is disrobing.
Drone wars.
Research assistant Subin Ryoo contributed to this article.
3D Robotics, started by kid genius Mexican engineer Jordi Muñoz, now 27, and Wired magazine visionary Chris Anderson, 52, just received $30 million in additional investor funding.
The company is expanding to 100 employees spread among current engineering headquarters on Convoy Court in San Diego, manufacturing facilities in Tijuana, and sales and marketing in Berkeley, with capacity expected to double.
3D Robotics makes domestic drones, little guys costing about $400 to $1,000, not the $15 million jobs made across town at General Atomics. But more 3D Iris quadcopters whir from Brazil to Britain, California to Iowa than all the frightening or heroic (depending on your viewpoint) military models cruising over Pakistan and Yemen.
The guts, how they essentially work, is essentially the same, however.
“Ours are not bulletproof,” says Muñoz, as he shows us around the big engineering room on Convoy Court. Muñoz is tall, soft-spoken, the son of a Baja psychiatrist and an accountant.
He holds up an octacopter. It looks like a three-foot water spider. The eight legs are stiff black metal with white propellers atop each end. The cigarette-pack-sized autopilot, or brain, sits in the middle surrounded by red and blue wires. The company’s top-selling $150 autopilots can turn any remote-control model airplane into a true autonomous drone.
Imagine a GoPro camera on this baby. (The new Iris sells for $979 with custom GoPro, $749 without.) Now programmed by your smartphone, the spider is cruising the surf off Ipanema (or Windansea in La Jolla), taking shots of the pros for far less than a surf photographer in the water could do it, or maybe filming French tourists in their bikinis, or ...
The practical Muñoz interrupts, “or medicine delivery, archeological inspection, construction, real estate, search and rescue, traffic monitoring, agriculture, border and home security, you name it.”
Anderson explains, “Our job as technologists is to create the platform and let the customer invent the use.”
We walk the San Diego factory — soon to be tripled in size and moved to Otay Mesa — but Anderson speaks by phone from the company’s converted brass factory warehouse in Berkeley. He’s testing a new model that, he says, should be ready by Thanksgiving.
Anderson talks twice as fast as Muñoz — and that is fast. “I don’t want to live a long time,” he says, “but I want to get a lot done in the time I have.” When he pauses, the thrum of little rotors comes through my iPhone.
“You can’t fly a drone over Berkeley,” Anderson says. Those are FAA rules. So Anderson is doing indoor testing. What fun! In America, drones must stay below a 400-foot ceiling, keep two miles away from any airport, and cannot be used for “commercial” purposes.
A farmer in the Central Valley or Iowa can have the drone check whether his fields need more anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, for instance, or whether the sprinkling system is functioning well, but a commercial drone company may not sell drone services to the farmer as a crop-dusting company might. Congress (good luck!) is set to review the rules in 2015, and this is why half of 3D Robotics’ sales come from abroad.
But what has made the drone revolution possible?
It’s the smartphone you hold in your hand.
Once smartphones in the millions and billions added GPS and accelerometers, “costs were democratized,” as Muñoz puts it.
I draw the analogy to computer graphics and gaming. A director of Google Earth once told me that when he worked for Silicon Graphics, only the CIA and the military could afford the technology. Once the chips made it to Xbox, and millions of gamers began to buy and play, the technology was — democratized.
What has made 3D Robotics possible itself is the cool partnership of Anderson and Muñoz. Anderson built his first drone out of Legos on the proverbial dining room table attempting to get his kids interested in science.
“I have an unfortunate tendency to commercialize my hobbies,” says Anderson, who once founded a successful company called GeekDadInc.
That drone is now in the Lego museum in Holland.
Anderson also knew a thing or two about selling and buying over the Internet, having written the best-selling book on the subject, “The Long Tail.”
He also knew more than a little about open-source communities and how the generation growing up on the Internet, like Muñoz’s, were used to getting everything for free, from music to movies, since he had written the book on that subject, too, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.” And, of course, his current book is called “The Makers: The New Industrial Revolution.”
So Anderson knew how to cast a clever net. He started a site called DIY Robotics, as in do-it-yourself, and the site soon aggregated an enthusiastic geek-horde of dronesters. Maybe they coded for Apple, maybe they day-jobbed for General Atomics, or — maybe one was a 19-year-old who seemed to know more about electronic engineering than most post-docs at Stanford. Anderson couldn’t guess how old Muñoz was or where he was really from any more than a World of Warcraft player knows who his teammates really are.
But that’s how they met.
It was like Jobs and Wozniak connecting over the Internet.
Muñoz built his first drone in a bout of boredom waiting for a green card. His mother gave him a remote-control helicopter, and he decided to make it autonomous. This took a week. A week with many crashes. But friends in the open-source community started bugging him, “Jordi, can you build me one?” He assembled 40 in his garage and sold them in one day over the Internet.
“I said, aah, this is a business,” Muñoz says. “This is actually interesting. Now I am actually making money.”
In the company’s first year, it did $250,000 worth of business. By the third year, 2011, it was $3 million.
The beauty of open-source development is that some of your best ideas and coding come from others for free, while at the same time 3D Robotics often publishes its diagrams and coding without patents in order to ramp up innovation by outside contributors. This sounds crazy to old-school patent attorneys but, Munoz says, “It destroys the Chinese cloners.”
Smartphones, open-source, Internet sales, short supply chain from Tijuana not Shanzhai, one partner who came up with drones in his garage and another who made them on his dining-room table out of Legos. The latter, don’t forget, is pretty much on a first-name basis with every game-changing inventor and venture capitalist in Northern California as the former editor-in-chief of Wired.
The drone future? Sci-fi for real is only 10 years away, Muñoz believes. Ball-drones will be able to fan out (“plate scanning”) and talk to each other not unlike the small drones in a movie Muñoz likes a lot, “Prometheus”: “Go here! No, the target’s there! Screw you, my batteries are down!” Sensors will be so good, drones will “see” walls, whereas now they can only be programmed to avoid obstacles the controller knows are there.
What’s to protect America from too much dronage?
“As soon as you give access to regular people, there’s something for everybody,” Muñoz says. “You’ve democratized the process. Regular people will be spying on regular people. Government will be spying on regular people. And regular people will be spying on the government.” To Muñoz, it’s like the medical system in the latest sci-fi movie “Elysium,” cancer-curing machines that start with the elite then inexorably move to the people. Sooner or later technology gets to everyone, protecting us all.
Let’s hope he’s right.
Like fracking, like genetic engineering, like ever-smarter smartphones and robots, the future is disrobing.
Drone wars.
Research assistant Subin Ryoo contributed to this article.
