An underdog of China's tech scene is taking on industry leaders with a $290 drone that fits in your pocket by Bu Xiang, Wang Pan, and Tyler Olson on Dec 30, 2016, 11:50 AM Advertisement
 Outside the Zhongguancun Software Park, Yang Jianjun, founder of Zerotech, and an engineer are standing on the empty lawn in front of the building entrance with a smartphone. They send a small silver aircraft with four propellers into the air 20 meters away. A minute later they bring it back. When the engineer approaches the drone, about the size of two bars of soap, it automatically moves backward. When the engineer moves back, the drone moves closer. “This uses a preliminary facial recognition function,” Yang Jianjun explains. The drone has recorded a video that can be played directly on a smartphone. Yang Jianjun is satisfied overall with the testing process. He mentions one tiny problem he noticed to the engineer related to slight shaking after the aircraft is first tossed into the air. During the last year and a half, Zerotech has created quite a stir. Using Qualcomm’s integrated SoC (system on chip) platform, they have rapidly reduced the size of their drones from to around 7 ounces, and the price from $500-$800 down to around $290. For comparison, industry leader DJI’s small portable Mavic Pro drone weighs 26 ounces and costs $725.  Yang Jianjun gave Zerotech's new Dobby drone its simple crowning attribute: its pocket size.
By doing so, he has created a new category of drone in the same professional class as DJI’s, separate from the many other UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) on the market. “Unlike DJI’s professional photography drones, which use SLR cameras, portable pocket drones use digital cameras,” Yang Jianjun said. Before being replaced by smartphone cameras, digital cameras had a market share vastly surpassing professional grade cameras, and created opportunities for some companies to profit. Today, market demand for light, low volume pocket drones, including drones that fit inside backpacks, is rising by the month. Tencent Tech learned from upstream suppliers that production of Dobby is about 25,000 units per month. “We’ll soon be up to 30,000,” Yang Jianjun commented. “And next year, we will definitely exceed 1 million units.”  Scott Zhang, Thundersoft senior VP, in charge of UAV business, is even more optimistic.
“In two years, portable drones can make the same progress that professional photography grade drones (DJI) took four or five years to make,” Zhang said. DJI’s annual sales are $1.4 million. At roughly $725 yuan per unit, that’s 2 million units. Portable drones may only represent a transitional stage to the flying robots of the future. Aerial photography and video recording is just one area of functionality, in the future they could constitute a new computing platform. How portable drones were developed After the drone market heated up under DJI’s influence, many other producers inside and outside China followed its lead. There was a brief boom. DJI’s head start and exceptional R&D resources have let it dominate 70-80% of the four-propeller drone professional photography market. Its competitors have not been able to catch up. To compete successfully against DJI, companies need to take another path. Miniaturization is one such path. Yang Jianjun still remembers the stress of working on drone miniaturization with others at Qualcomm.  In late August of last year, teams at both Zerotech and Qualcomm had been working overtime for six months. Qualcomm sent engineers from the US. They worked night and day, but it was not clear whether they would be able to build something that would fly using the Qualcomm SoC.
“At the time, I felt almost ready to give up,” Yang Jianjun recalls to Tencent Tech. When Yang first came up with the idea for pocket drones, it was like a light went on. Even if it could only take a few still photos, it would represent a new direction for drones. “A reporter chasing a story could take photos of a sudden event," he said. "You could take the drone right out of your pocket to snap a few aerial shots, like an exclusive secret weapon.” Miniaturizing drones to be portable is an enormous challenge. US chip manufacturer Qualcomm wants to integrate imaging, CPU, communications, and remote control functions onto a processor small enough to fit on a tiny motherboard.  Qualcomm is a world-class company in the areas of mobile communications and chip integration, but many of the Chinese companies they contacted about making breakthroughs in new integrated motherboard applications turned them down.
Then, Qualcomm found Yang Jianjun, and he agreed to work with them. “We hit it off right away,” he said. It was Yang’s first time using integrated motherboards. As the first company to join this collaboration, they ran into a lot of technical pitfalls. Zerotech’s algorithms and operating system could not be installed on Qualcomm’s integrated chip platform. Things like ports and pins took up a lot of time. Zerotech’s engineers worked with the engineers from the US for a month to solve problems with basic flight control, until last August, when the aircraft finally took flight. It was one o’clock in the morning. One of the US engineers sent an email to report the good news. It was coming up on China’s National Day celebration, when flight restrictions in Beijing are strictest. All debugging and test flights had to be conducted indoors.  Ultimately, Yang Jianjun learned that the challenge of flight was only the first step. The aircraft’s weight was reduced all at once from 2.6 lbs to less than half a pound. Turning the miniaturized drone into a working product would take more work.
In the beginning, there were many flaws in the operating system, causing the aircraft to suddenly stall mid-flight. Even installing a GPS chip on the aircraft’s small body proved daunting. It required complicated programming, higher cost, and higher power consumption. But Yang Jianjun insisted on keeping the function. Without GPS, flight is slower, and the drone can't be used outdoors. A mobile phone’s GPS function only requires a general location. There's a big margin of error, and undetermined locations are calibrated by the map. Aircraft are different — the margin of error is just half a meter. The problem was eventually solved with boosting GPS signal strength and blocking interference. Yang Jianjun and his team developed a method of digital stabilization to make sure the drone's camera stayed steady. Digital stabilization executes precise movements to shift the image in response to the aircraft’s position and keep the image stable from the user’s perspective. By March 2016, the drone fit inside Yang Jianjun’s pocket. It had gone through two months of debugging and fine tuning. Yang Jianjun remembers its May 25 official release — the same day as the release of Xiaomi’s drone. The difference was that Xiaomi’s drone crashed. Yang’s drone sold tens of thousands.  Yang Jianjun is imagining even greater possibilities for Dobby. He has discovered that, in addition to still images, Dobby can take video, which could be attractive to ordinary people.
He realized that no one was offering streaming video with a 20-meter radius. Pocket drones could let anyone climb to the top of a mountain or reach angles that selfie sticks can't. After nine years working with UAVs, Yang Jianjun may have found a way around DJI. “The aircraft itself is an intake, an entry point,” Yang said. Zerotech’s second generation drone is scheduled for official release at the January 2017 CES in Las Vegas. The race toward flying robots Dobby's next generation will be better at eliminating heat, stabilizing images, and staying in flight for longer. “The artificial intelligence module will make it even smarter,” Yang said. In additional to facial recognition, it will be able to recognize things like cars and people to automatically avoid collisions. Thundersoft VP Scott Zhang imagines drones becoming “personal photographers,” following you wherever you go and taking pictures. For the next-next generation of products, Yang Jianjun wants to make drones that fly themselves on auto-pilot. “You will be able to indicate a house on your phone and have the drone fly there itself,” Yang Jianjun said.  Zerotech’s sales volume is set to give the company an advantageous position in the market. People frequently use their products, which is important for data collection.
"Firms like Google have the best artifical intelligence because they collect the most data from all over the world," Yang Jianjun said. Zerotech has already raised $21 million in round B financing. The primary investors were Xinda Guocui and Minghang Capital. Qualcomm Ventures also invested. According to information obtained by Tencent Tech, Samsung is also interested in investing in Zerotech. The functions of a smartphone can be divided into communication, imaging, and operating system. For a drone, it’s basically communication, imaging, and operating system — plus flight controls. Years ago, when smartphones first appeared, few people could have foreseen what would happen in the years to come. If today’s drones capture a wide enough user base, gradually all kinds of new applications will be produced for them, growing the market bigger and bigger. "A drone is really just a flying robot with propellers," Qualcomm’s Yan Chenwei said. "These products offer people an enormous space for imagination." Yang Jianjun and Yan Chenwei both believe 2017 will be the first year of the age of smart drones. Developments in computer vision, artificial intelligence, and other areas need somewhere to go, and drones may be just the destination. Translated by Tyler Olson. SEE ALSO: Indonesia looks a lot like China did six or seven years ago
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