Drones and US Manufacturing
I’ve got a decent collection of small drones (2 x DJI Mini 3 Pro, Air 2S, etc.), and am looking at getting something in the low-end industrial range as well, along with going through the FAA Part 107 process as a “certified drone pilot”. The 249g Mini 3/4 Pro are remarkably capable for random imaging, and much easier to travel with, much lower regulatory hassle (both to operate and for travel), and produce great results for daytime photography.
The category I’d want to upgrade to are the $3-10k thermal+visible drones, for a variety of applications — volunteer search and rescue would be my primary “practice” use case (and preparedness for actual combat the real use case), but would also use it to film people operating under NVG/thermal themselves on the ground, maybe do some thermal imaging of buildings for energy efficiency, etc.
While it would be nice to get a US product, that just doesn’t seem viable in the current market. I do care about “operates without hitting someone else’s server for permission”, geofencing, etc., and ideally open source or at least “pinnable” firmware/no required firmware updates to “bad” firmware, but there’s nothing really good in this price range/capability set made anywhere but China.
I’d also like something not ITAR controlled.
The main options seem to be:
DJI Mavic 3T or (maybe) DJI Matrice 30T
Autel Evo II v2 or v3 or Autel EVO Max 4T
Teledyne FLIR SIRAS
Parrot ANAFI USA
(the DJI Matrice 350 RTK seems too big/expensive for consideration in this set)
The DJI and Autels are made in China, and DJI seems to have anti-freedom firmware. I know there is jailbreaking for various versions of DJI, mainly the lower end or older products, and this is an option, but it’s not really sustainable for a $10k product which might actually need critical updates. The Evo II v2 was fairly “offline ok”, but the newer ones seem to also implement geofencing and other restrictions.
The Parrot product is 1-2 generations behind, 2x the price, and generally mediocre — it seems to essentially only exist because of a need for NDAA/USA-production drones for government sales.
The Teledyne looks ok but I’ve never seen one in real life.
There are programs in DOD to try to develop and measure US-content and cybersecurity of drones, e.g. https://advexure.com/pages/ndaa-compliant-blue-uas — I think the “Green UAS” level would be most suitable for what I want. The "cleared list" is depressingly short. The whole effort seems to be trying to solve a real problem but in the dumbest and most USG-way possible, with lots of contractor graft and mediocrity.
This is all just for basic drone stuff. The “interesting” capabilities are mesh, autonomy, etc., all of which requires having the basic drone substrate with simple launch recovery as a first step. The Chinese manufacturers are pushing ahead with those capabilities too, and those are much harder to rip out or secure.
I wish there were the George Hotz or John Carmack or Palmer Luckey of relatively inexpensive yet capable drones.
For now, the right choice for me is probably to just find one of the Chinese models which is ok with being run without Internet access/mandatory firmware updates, and which doesn’t require contacting their servers in operation, and then just use that — maybe looking into jailbreaking it a bit, too.