The Story of What Powers Today’s Drone Industry: Pixhawk
Our two previous articles individually covered how open source and open standards impact the drone industry. This post will bring open source and open standards together with Pixhawk.
Today, Pixhawk is the number one hardware autopilot unit and standard powering the largest part of the drone industry, but it wasn’t the intention at the beginning.
Let’s travel back in time to 2008, when our CEO Lorenz Meier was a student. For his masters, he wanted to create a drone that would avoid obstacles indoors. This was visionary at the time; not even ground robots were at that point yet.
He quickly realized that this is a hard problem to solve, but didn’t give up on his idea. Instead, he sought out the help of his professor, Marc Pollefeys (a fantastic enabler of the drone industry), and asked if he could organize a student team to work with him on this project.
Lorenz recruited fourteen students to help him and together they built their own hardware and software. After nine months of work, they competed in a drone competition and won! Their drone had onboard computer vision, which hadn’t been done before. This meant the drone was able to recognize certain patterns, like a picture on a wall, as well as recognize which picture was on the wall while flying through its indoor environment.
