undefined | Better HN

0 pointsqazxcvbnmlp1y ago0 comments

Everything here is possible, the gap in implementation is that it’s a) expensive and b) non trivial engineering work. There is vanishingly small overlap between the people whom have the capital for parts, the understanding of the engineering needed, free time to do it and desire to do it for free.

The people whom have the true multidisciplinary understanding to do robotics well can usually also consult (with little difficulty finding work) for $$$s per hour and get the same “problem solving satisfaction”.

Open source software shortcuts a couple of these limitations because you can work on it with little investment over than time.

0 comments

Aurornis1y ago

> Everything here is possible, the gap in implementation is that it’s a) expensive and b) non trivial engineering work.

The real issue is that it's just not interesting or worth it.

Why would you want to put LTE or Starlink on a drone? Flight time is around 30 minutes with current battery technology and you're not legally allowed to fly past line of sight anyway. Strapping a bunch of extra gear to a drone would cut flight times and add basically nothing to the experience.

These things aren't popular because they're not interesting to the people who build and fly drones.

nine_k1y ago

Not interesting to the people who build amateur drones for fun.

I bet that stuff like different Linux kernel schedulers, or entirely new subsystems like io_uring are written by not entirely amateurs and not completely for fun. But the ecosystem is such that open-source licensing works for such efforts. For some reasons, the same is not true for the open-source firmware or hardware used in drones.

One could contemplate on the structure of incentives that could produce a viable pool of open technologies for advanced (including non-amateur) drones.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse