K
Kathleen Martin
Guest
In the past year, drone software start-up Auterion has grown its customer-base of drone manufacturers from five partners to one hundred, according to founder and CEO Lorenz Meier. The four year-old Swiss-American startup has produced drone software from the beginning, but Lorenz ties the recent inflection point to its Skynode reference hardware.
“A manufacturer can bolt Skynode onto aerial hardware to create a drone, with Skynode as the brains. This is our analogy to the original Google Nexus phone that ran Android. We don’t intend for Skynode to be the final gold standard, but rather an example that’s already jump-starting the industry,” says Meier.
Although Auterion views itself as fundamentally a software company, its strategy is to provide Skynode as a complete package, so as to demonstrate to drone hardware companies what they can do with an integrated suite of AuterionOS software. The hope is that hardware manufacturers will see Skynode as an inspiration to build their own integrated Flight Control Units running AuterionOS.
Leveling Up The Industry
Over a decade of experience in the drone industry has led Lorenz to believe that most drone startups have squandered investment capital, re-engineering the same robotics functionality over and over again. The goal of Skynode and its potential successors is to become a standardized platform for drone software, allowing other startups to focus on applications.
“AuterionOS provides everything from the operating system kernel to device drivers to photo management,” explains Meier. “But we’re not building business applications like cargo scheduling, 3D mapping, or visual inspection of buildings. We leave those to the application-level companies who specialize in those areas.”
Continue reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidsilver/2022/01/24/auterion-predicts-its-skynode-hardware-will-propel-the-drone-industry/?sh=27bdf62a4942
“A manufacturer can bolt Skynode onto aerial hardware to create a drone, with Skynode as the brains. This is our analogy to the original Google Nexus phone that ran Android. We don’t intend for Skynode to be the final gold standard, but rather an example that’s already jump-starting the industry,” says Meier.
Although Auterion views itself as fundamentally a software company, its strategy is to provide Skynode as a complete package, so as to demonstrate to drone hardware companies what they can do with an integrated suite of AuterionOS software. The hope is that hardware manufacturers will see Skynode as an inspiration to build their own integrated Flight Control Units running AuterionOS.
Leveling Up The Industry
Over a decade of experience in the drone industry has led Lorenz to believe that most drone startups have squandered investment capital, re-engineering the same robotics functionality over and over again. The goal of Skynode and its potential successors is to become a standardized platform for drone software, allowing other startups to focus on applications.
“AuterionOS provides everything from the operating system kernel to device drivers to photo management,” explains Meier. “But we’re not building business applications like cargo scheduling, 3D mapping, or visual inspection of buildings. We leave those to the application-level companies who specialize in those areas.”
Continue reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidsilver/2022/01/24/auterion-predicts-its-skynode-hardware-will-propel-the-drone-industry/?sh=27bdf62a4942
