"Skyfront has developed Tailwind, a hybrid gas-electric drone that also is used in work site surveys and can fly for more than four hours, roughly 10 times more than typical.
'We're building in redundancy in the communication link and the aircraft itself ... to make sure (crashes) never happen,' Mestler said. 'That's a problem we solved.'
Mestler and Dobbs agreed that Menlo Park is a drone-development hot spot because of the infusion of venture capital and engineering talent coming out of Stanford and UC-Berkeley.
'I think the
concentration of venture capital is why a lot of commercial drone
operations have gotten their start here ... and Silicon Valley often
provides leadership and technology,' Dobbs said.
Mestler said
drone companies tend to flock together to share research and build
partnerships, though he wouldn't share specifics."My quadcopter has no automation whatsover. I've spent months learning to fly it. Now anybody can buy a new quadcopter and fly better than I do now with mine. This is both good and bad, of course, because "anybody" includes idiots. But meanwhile usefulness is also growing in the field. that's probably the tradeoff right there.
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