DJI may be synonymous with “drone”, but after the US Armed Forces, the Pentagon, and the Department of the Interior began banning and founding Chinese models on espionage fears, it created a vacuum in the market for a drone that could trust the government of the United States.
But the U.S. Department of Defense can already fill that gap. It just unpacked a program designed to find more tasty drones – one that actually launched in November 2018, probably long before tensions with China passed.
Today, the DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit announces not one, not two, but five such drones that have been tested, approved, and are now formally available for government use – including two formerly consumer-oriented drone companies Skydio (based in California) and Parrot (based in France).
The five DIU-approved drones are:
Keep in mind that there is nothing that will necessarily prevent these companies from selling drones to the US government for now. Skydio tells for example The edge that it has already shipped units of the X2-D to “customers with early access” and has other deals in the works.
But after working with these five companies for the past 18 months – helping them tweak their airframes, remove potential Chinese components, test cyber security penetration, and standardize on communications protocols and controls – and certify each, the DIU is mindful that these specific drones are actually ready for government work. “It’s one of the first times we as the federal government have said that and it feels really comfortable to say that,” says DIU project manager Matthew Borowski.
Another advantage of the program: they will be on the GSA schedule, which means government agencies will have to be able to buy them in bulk for a discount.
The U.S. military may end up as one of those bulk customers. The current plan is that one of these five drones will be chosen to complete a sequence that every plateau in the army could see that they felt one day or another in the next six months, according to DIU project manager Chris Bonzagni.
The general idea is that each echelon of the U.S. Army may have a different type of drone that it can use – including “soldier-carried sensors” such as the pocket-sized FLIR Black Hornet for each squad, a “short range reconnaissance” drone for each plateau, and fixed-wing (think of aircraft, not quadcopter) Raven and Puma drones at the company and battalion levels. Today’s drones are all candidates for that short range contract (SRR), specifically.
Speaking of FLIR, it grabbed $ 60 million in Army contracts for the Black Hornet as of May, and it also supplies the Hadron thermal camera module used in at least two of the new drones featured today. .)
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As you can see in the image above, the basic promotion requirements for the SRR program were not too strict compared to existing consumer grade drones – but that does not mean that the SRR candidates are consumer money.
Even the Parrot Anafi, whose consumer version retails for $ 700, now has an array of three cameras with both thermal imaging and an optional 32x digital zoom, is sealed so it can fly in the rain, and has special antennas so it can be regulated and communicate over DoD frequency bands. Each drone also had to weigh less than three pounds and “take less than 2 minutes to collect and fit in a standard soldier’s backpack.”
They will also have premium price tags: $ 14,000 for a full Parrot Anafi system, as well as $ 16K with an additional military radio link, and between $ 10,000 and $ 20,000 for a full Skydio X2-D.
That DoD radio adaptation applies to all of these drones, such as standardization on the MAVLink protocol and open source PX4 flight software, so that military and other government agencies can also standardize on what kind of controller they want. (We are pleased to announce that the Parrot has a new controller, as opposed to the ones we did not like in our original reviews of Parrot Anafi and Skydio 2.)
We’ve written before about how Skydio and Parrot were potentially turning to military and industrial drones – Parrot actually followed suit – and the DIU is taking some credit for helping these companies push above the consumer market. The unit points out that each company received millions from the U.S. government to help build military-class drones, and each equally wound up with a business variant. Skydio challenges that a bit, though, and tells us that the DoD benefited from it syn expertise too – and that the $ 4 million it recently received under the Defense Production Act was simply used to “fund incremental R & D projects on next-gen technologies,” not the X2 build.
Besides, you might be interested to know that DJI was not running at all for this program. While Trump technically did not sign the National Defense Authorization Act banning “foreign unmanned aerial vehicle systems” until last December – where “foreign” explicitly means “China”, just to be clear, the DIU says the Chinese company will never has trouble applying.
