Is the DIY Drone Movement About to Launch a Billion-Dollar Industry?

(Source: Gizmodo.com)  

Back in the 1970s, hobbyists like Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak built homebrew computers that eventually fueled the lucrative PC revolution. Now, a new movement of hobbyists is trying to imitate this DIY strategy to jumpstart the drone industry. But can today’s calculated drone entrepreneurialism really be considered “DIY” at all?

Chris Anderson has a hobby. Well, Chris Anderson had a hobby. The former Wired editor started getting interested in the DIY nature of drones back in 2007. Before he knew it, the London native had resigned from the magazine “to spend more time with his robots.” Now, Chris Anderson has an enterprise: 3D Robotics. You could call him the Steve Jobs of drones, but you wouldn’t. Unlike Jobs, Anderson didn’t stumble on a homebrew tech movement and figure out how to market its products. He’s marketing the DIY movement itself.

Drones — that is, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for civilian use — are the perfect DIY tech for the 2010s. A decade of rapid innovation in the smartphone market has yielded a whole host of low-priced sensors that make it possible for anyone to fly robots with little to no experience. Accelerometers, gyroscopes, wireless antennas, autopilot systems, cameras, and processors that once cost hundreds of dollars a piece, can now be bundled into a basketball-sized aircraft and controlled from a smartphone. It’s so cheap and easy that people are building drones in their garages.

“This is a classic grassroots, bottom-up approach,” Anderson told Gizmodo in a recent interview. “The pace of innovation on the grassroots is so much faster.”

The DIY community loves this idea. What doesn’t sound awesome about building a flying robot cobbled together from cheap electronics? In recent years, however, profit-hungry corporations have also learned to love this idea. Straddling both sides, Anderson’s 3D Robotics is trying to turn a hobbyist fascination into a multimillion dollar business. But the outcome will hardly be DIY.

Continue Reading at Gizmodo.com…