Auterion Predicts Its Skynode Hardware Will Propel The Drone Industry

In the past year, drone software start-up Auterion has grown its customer-base of drone manufacturers from five partners to one hundred, according to founder and CEO Lorenz Meier. The four year-old Swiss-American startup has produced drone software from the beginning, but Lorenz ties the recent inflection point to its Skynode reference hardware.

“A manufacturer can bolt Skynode onto aerial hardware to create a drone, with Skynode as the brains. This is our analogy to the original Google Nexus phone that ran Android. We don’t intend for Skynode to be the final gold standard, but rather an example that’s already jump-starting the industry,” says Meier.

Although Auterion views itself as fundamentally a software company, its strategy is to provide Skynode as a complete package, so as to demonstrate to drone hardware companies what they can do with an integrated suite of AuterionOS software. The hope is that hardware manufacturers will see Skynode as an inspiration to build their own integrated Flight Control Units running AuterionOS.

Leveling Up The Industry

Over a decade of experience in the drone industry has led Lorenz to believe that most drone startups have squandered investment capital, re-engineering the same robotics functionality over and over again. The goal of Skynode and its potential successors is to become a standardized platform for drone software, allowing other startups to focus on applications.

“AuterionOS provides everything from the operating system kernel to device drivers to photo management,” explains Meier. “But we’re not building business applications like cargo scheduling, 3D mapping, or visual inspection of buildings. We leave those to the application-level companies who specialize in those areas.”

Due to the platform nature of AuterionOS, and the tremendous growth in Skynode customers, Lorenz predicts that 75% of drones will eventually run Auterion’s software. “It’s a bold statement but a correct statement,” he judges.

Drone Communication

Auterion designs each Skynode-enabled drone to be a node on a network.

”Networked communications will lead to a Cambrian explosion in the drone industry,” Meier predicts. “We saw the same dynamic with digital photographs. Point-and-shoot digital cameras have been around for 20 years, but it took smartphones, with their network connections, to facilitate Instagram.”

In addition to software onboard the drone, Auterion software provides customers with fleet-level views of their drone networks. Customers can manage fully autonomous, semi-autonomous, and piloted configurations of drones working together. On top of that, Auterion’s bet is that customers will build on the drones’ networking capabilities to provide novel types of fleet functionality.

Going To Market

Auterion has raised $40 million in investment funding since inception, and now counts eighty employees, split evenly between Zurich and Los Angeles.

Although their initial focus is the United States and Europe, Lorenz sees the rest of the world following a similar, if slightly delayed, trajectory of drone adoption.

“Our path to market is through our manufacturing partners,” Lorenz outlines. “Over time, end-users will experience Auterion’s software suite and begin to seek out drone manufacturers running AuterionOS. Our goal at the moment is to turn complex robotics problems into APIs for our manufacturing partners, so they can solve problems for customers.”