There wasn't a SDK or platform to build on and we didn't take any actual orders for anything (so we had minimal success stories or $$$). The hardware we showed was built by us, and ran a custom OS (not based on linux) that was nearly impossible to work with. We had a very talented engineer rage-quit after spending a week attempting to figure out how the OS handled the internal message bus system to debug an issue.
The hardware was also crazy expensive. We built literally everything: the vehicles, autopilot, the autopilot OS, the comms board that connected to motors (and enclosures), the sensor boards (GPS, gyro, etc), the radio that talked to the autopilot, the flight planning software, and later an entire enterprise cloud stack written in only the newest of the new JS frameworks and containers. The team often decided to do things such as not use off-the-shelf processors like the Nvidia TK1 or existing embedded software solutions -- nothing was 'good enough' so everything was invented.
Oh, and did I mention we also cycled through recruiters like candy?
> entire enterprise cloud stack written in only the newest of the new JS frameworks and containers
I'm of the opinion that the JS ecosystem is one of the few spaces where a healthy dose of NIH can save you a lot of time and money in the long run. And it seems like the only place where they didn't go for a custom solution.
Takes 3 weeks to debug.
I'm absolutely going to add "not inough humility" to the list from now on, it works just too well :)
Disclosure, I originally was the product manager for 3DR's flagship software product, Site Scan, which drove our transition from a hardware business to a software business, and I am currently VP of Marketing and Business Development here. Each mine that deploys our software saves, on average, 6 figures per year (after the product cost). This is on man-hour costs alone - the value is greater if you look at the increased safety of taking individuals out of active mines and increasing topography capture that enables analysts to identify issues before they turn into safety hazards on site.
That's just for one industry we serve - cost savings/time savings/improvements in project pursuit are all high for construction and engineering as well.
I think it's likely you saw some presentations from companies that had not done enough customer discovery or they were perhaps just very early in the process of identifying real problems and building the right solutions, but it's not representative of the industry.
Where do the savings come from?
(disclosure: I work for OTTO Motors, which has customers in this space)
Take you standard Amazon warehouse for small articles as an example. Maximizing untilisation, meaning the ratio between space used und spa e available, in that case you end up with a never ending mixture of differwnt small articles in the same location. Without RFID chips on every article, which is as of now prohibitively expensive, the only feasible way to count the inventory is using people.
For other warehouses and articles, like white goods or other large stuff that easily identified with out touching it whether a drone, a ground vehicle or something running on rails is better suited depends on a couple of factors. If you might run into situations that require a chenged warehouse layout, which occurs much more often than you think, fixed installations add a lot to the fix costs and rwduce flexibility.
Using ground based solutions runs into issues with high warehouses, storing up to 15 meters in height is not uncommon. Again, density is the main reason for this, getting more inventory at the se number of square meters. In that case a drone is both more flexible and can cover the heights as well.
But thats theory, not sure what came out of the Fraunhofer trials covering white goods.
Simply being able to fly a high resolution camera with a bright light up underneath a bridge probably saves an enormous amount of time.
On my soapbox, the big missing piece in drones is a real platform for managing the concept of time series map data for a layperson. There is a lot of dimensions in the data that drones generate (lat, long, alt, color, time, camera stuff, angle of image, etc). Tons of data, and nobody has convincingly showed anything that goes into trend analysis. I’m not sure that any company is really delivering on the concept that this data needs to be controlled and analyzed. Especially in farms, the time series part is important, but it is mostly snapshots and intuition right now.
Meanwhile, its been a year since Verizon acquired Skyward - which was a force in the drone industry pushing for better flight management tools, better collaboration with ATC, and an affordable product for small-time commercial operators that got most of their money as contractors/service providers.
At the enterprise level, Drones just didn't solve a lot of problems. At the small farmer, construction contractor, gravel pit, etc, drones solved a lot of problems, but drones were the anti-scale solution. They Reduced the work so drastically, and improved the result so much that there was no need to scale up software licenses. In many cases, it just did the work better, in a 10th of the time, at a much lower cost. But, there was not a giant amount of work in the queue for those companies. Just a steady flow of the same jobs that used to take longer.
Now, beyond visual line of sight (BVLS) flights might change that for the enterprise eventually, Power lines, rails, pipelines, and roads are all good candidates for remote, automated drone inspection. But, I suspect that it will be either DJI hardware, Custom Hardware, and some amount of custom software that really integrates drones into the enterprise process. Flight planning is only part of the picture. Maybe Airware had it all, but, if so, they were too early - they couldn't outlast the slow (and rational) pace of aviation regulatory change.