Deutscher sets global standard for operating system

Auterion is an amazing success story: The start-up, which was only founded in 2018, has a good chance of setting a global standard for moving robots with its open source software – becoming the brain, so to speak, of drones and air taxis to submarine robots. The market is large, according to the Drone II industry service, sales in the civil drone market will almost double in the next five years from 22 to 43 billion dollars.

So far, the Chinese provider DJI has dominated the drone market. With the political tensions between the US and China, however, that changes radically. The US military, which uses drones for reconnaissance and combat missions, no longer buys drones from China.

In September 2020, the largest army in the western world decided that their small reconnaissance drones had to meet a standard developed by Auterion. This includes, for example, Mavlink, the protocol for communication between drones. “This not only disrupts the industry, but is a decision of geostrategic importance,” said Meier at the time.

Greetings from Musk

Meier’s visit to Silicon Valley shows which league Auterion is in. In the entrance area of ​​Kitty Hawk’s workshop there is a Merlin engine that put a rocket from Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX into orbit. A gift from Musk for his friend and Google founder Larry Page, who now wants to finance the development of autonomous flying taxis with Kittyhawk.

“What a billionaire gives to another,” comments Chris Anderson laconically on the object on display. The Brit is himself a legend in Silicon Valley. For more than a decade he led the nerd lifestyle magazine “Wired” as editor-in-chief and wrote a world best-seller with “The Long Tail”.

Anderson later founded the drone manufacturer 3D Robotics. It once looked as if it could dominate the global market for unmanned aerial vehicles – but failed due to competition from China.

In June, Kitty Hawk bought Anderson’s company and made him chief product officer and chief operating officer, the right-hand man of Thrun.

A favorable development for Meier. The two have known each other for years, from the time of 3D Robotics. The product manager at Kitty Hawk is currently working on an important problem: In order for his Heaviside air taxi to fly autonomously, it needs a powerful brain. And Auterion could offer that.

“Android of the drone industry”

Meier is only 37 years old, but already a doyen of the scene. Meier was already working on drones while studying computer science in Konstanz. After completing his bachelor’s degree, he went to ETH Zurich, where he developed Pixhawk – the first open source autopilot for drones that was already used by 3D robotics and that is still the basis for Auterion today. In 2018 he founded Auterion to commercialize services related to his open source platform.

Auterion’s open operating system enables developers of autonomous aircraft to control their fleets. Meier calls it the “Android of the drone industry”, alluding to the smartphone operating system from Google, which many device manufacturers from Samsung to Oppo use so that they do not have to develop their own software.

Auterion is based in Zurich and Los Angeles. The start-up with around 80 employees has raised 40 million dollars in investor capital so far, including from the well-known financial investor Klaus Hommels. Another round of financing is pending.

Services and hardware

Open source is a counterintuitive business model: How does a company want to make a profit if it gives away a large part of its software and leaves important developments to external developers?

Auterion earns its money by selling Skynode and services such as subscriptions for its cloud suite – a user interface on which operators of drone fleets can keep an eye on what their aircraft are doing and which are in need of repair. The company has corporate clients like Shell, which oversees oil rigs with the small jets.

Auterion wouldn’t be the first open source platform to achieve a high rating. IBM paid $ 34 billion in 2018 for Red Hat, which sells Linux software to companies. A few months later, Microsoft bought the code exchange portal Github for $ 7.5 billion. Github’s smaller competitor Gitlab is planning a billion-dollar initial public offering.

Decline of the Chinese

DJI from China has long dominated the global drone market. In 2018, after the demise of 3D Robotics, three out of four commercial drones sold worldwide were from the Shenzhen-based company.

But times are changing. The company is on a US Department of Commerce list that bans it from buying or using American technology. DJI’s market share in commercial drones has fallen to just 54 percent, according to industry consultancy Skylogic Research. The company laid off or lost a third of its U.S. workforce, including numerous key developers and managers, according to Reuters.

Apart from DJI, the rest of the industry is fragmented, no other manufacturer currently has a double-digit market share. The largest US manufacturer, Skydio from Silicon Valley, is developing its own operating system for its drones. The drone that Skydio sells to the US military still has to be compatible with Auterion’s standard.

The US sanctions are not the only reason that DJI’s dominance is waning, says Meier. DJI is not a “customer-focused hardware company” like Apple, but a “hardware-focused hardware company” like Nokia once did. The market leader is developing technically sophisticated drones, but they miss out on many customer needs.

Drone Analyst’s David Benowitz also predicts the rise of open source software. For companies other than DJI it will be difficult to keep up with the concentrated power of the open source developers who are conquering more and more applications for themselves. “Auterion is a unique company,” says Benowitz, who lives in Shenzhen and used to work for DJI.

Robots in the deep sea

DJI’s loss of importance opens up new opportunities for small drone manufacturers – and open source software. Because the newcomers concentrate on the hardware, an open and inexpensive operating system comes in handy.

One of the startups is Watts Innovation from Baltimore. Its founder, Bobby Watts, came to Palo Alto from the east coast of America to meet Meier. Watts’ four-propeller PrismSky drone will cost $ 26,000 when it hits the market later this year.

Watts has been in the industry for a long time. He started out using drones for filming, baseball games, NASCAR races, action films. Meanwhile, other companies also bought his drones. He shows a video of a customer. A Watts drone is flying over a mountain range in Montana. A magnetometer the size of an ironing board hangs on a rope with which the customer searches for precious metals. The drone glides elegantly over the hills, disappears behind the treetops and reappears.

“Common standards make my life so much easier,” says Watts. With Pixhawk from Auterion, your battery supplier or the manufacturer of your camera tripods know your software and can tailor your offer accordingly. Anything else would be too much of an expense for a small company like his.

Auterion and Meier have even bigger goals. They want to reach not only drones but also moving robots with their platform. Take the oceans, for example: one of the most active developers for Auterion’s Pixhawk software is Blue Robotics, a developer of deep-sea robots.

Kitty Hawk with his air taxis would also be a coup.

Kitty Hawk as a customer

Anderson walks through the factory floor, where a finished, yellow and white “Heaviside” machine rests on two supports. Kitty Hawk founder Thrun wants to take her to the air in a few months – as the first human passenger.

Because Kitty Hawk, unlike air taxi developers such as Joby Aviation or Lilium, does not initially want to start in the USA, the company does not need a certification from the US aviation authority FAA until then, which could take longer for unmanned transport aircraft.

As early as next year, the planes are to start in regular operation and be able to carry a single passenger up to 150 kilometers without a pilot. That would give Kitty Hawk a head start over its competitors, who don’t want to start until 2024 at the earliest.

Openness as an advantage

Auterion has good cards with Kitty Hawk. Product manager Anderson is impressed by the openness of the system. Kitty Hawk would have to buy the entire system from established companies in the aviation industry such as Honeywell or from other drone developers. “We’re making ourselves hostages,” says Anderson.

Individual software modules such as the one for ground control will be safely used by Auterion, others will be developed themselves and everything will be merged into one system. “With Sebastian Thrun, we have the world’s best sensor fusion expert here, and we will hardly buy that from outside,” says Anderson.

In addition to the openness, open source has another advantage that at first glance is surprising: SpaceX rockets use the computer language HTML5, although this is not even certified for use in rockets. Why? Because it is used throughout the Internet and every tiny mistake is quickly repaired, ”says Meier.

The analogy to Kitty Hawk: Because thousands upon thousands of drones are already flying with Pixhawk software, major software errors would probably have been noticed. The Boeing 737 Max, which killed hundreds of people in 2019 due to a malfunction in the control system, was certified by the US aviation authority.

One foot in the door

Now the question is whether Kitty Hawk will also use the hardware from Auterions, the Skynode. Kitty Hawk has already built his own hardware for his autopilot and tested it on more than 700 flights. But Anderson wants Skynode to fly in the background to evaluate whether Auterion’s autopilot can handle the flight better.

“When I started, one in ten drones crashed. Then one in 100. We’ve become more reliable, crash after crash, ”says Anderson. But that has to get better and better, a crash has to be almost impossible. “When you transport people, that’s not an option.”

Before Meier says goodbye, Anderson asks if he can buy the Skynode directly from him. Meier doesn’t really want to give it up. It is the last copy he brought to California. He could have one delivered in a few days. But Anderson wants to test the autopilot immediately, even a few days are plenty of time in Silicon Valley. In the end, the Skynode stays in Palo Alto.

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