At present, the drone revolution has just begun, and it has become a great revolution. 2017 will be the first year of intelligent drones. Computer vision, artificial intelligence, etc. are developing rapidly, and an export is needed. UAVs may be such an export.
In the past one and a half years, the zero-degree intelligent control drone company created by Yang Jianjun has made a lot of noise. With the integration of Qualcomm chip platform technology, the weight of drones has dropped from more than one kilogram to 200 grams. From four or five thousand yuan to about 2,000 yuan. In comparison, the drone giant Dajiang launched the small portable product MavicPro weighing 743 grams, priced at about 5,000 yuan.
Yang Jianjun simply gave the newly developed drone Dobby an attribute - a pocket drone. As a result, Yang Jianjun created a new category of drones between the professional-grade drones in Dajiang and many multi-aviation model drones. "Compared to the professional shooting of Dajiang UAV, it is a SLR camera, and the pocket portable drone can be regarded as a single-chip camera." Yang Jianjun said.
"Pocket" revolution hits 2017 will become the first year of drone intelligent
The single-chip camera is commonly called a point-and-shoot camera. Because of the intelligence of the drone, Yang Jianjun carefully chose the name of the microcontroller. Before being replaced by smartphones, MCU shipments and market share far exceeded professional-grade cameras, which led to some companies' business boom. Today, the demand for pockets, including small, lightweight drones that can be packed in backpacks, is growing month by month. Tencent Technology learned from upstream suppliers that Dobby's monthly production capacity is 25,000 units. "We will soon have to make 30,000 units." Yang Jianjun said.
"I will definitely break through 1 million units next year." Zhang Shutao, senior vice president of Zhongke Chuangda and head of the drone business, is more optimistic. "Professional-level shooting drones (Dajiang) have passed the road for four or five years. The machine can be completed in one or two years. In fact, Dajiang now has a sales of 10 billion yuan a year, estimated at an average price of 5,000 yuan, about 2 million units.
More importantly, the portable drone may be just a transitional form in the future of airborne robots. Solving aerial photographing and recording video is only part of the function and may become a new computing platform in the future. With the entry of high-tech giants such as Qualcomm, Intel, MediaTek, and other mobile phone manufacturers such as Samsung and Xiaomi, there are also drone companies like Zero and Zero, which will hit the UAV in the past 10 times. Years of commercial barriers established in the field of drones. For pocket portable drones, it is impossible for Dajiang to blindly ignore the head and ignore it.
How is a portable drone made?
After the drone market was heated by Dajiang, many manufacturers at home and abroad followed suit and was once hot. However, with its first-mover advantage and super-strong research and development capabilities, DJI has occupied 70% of the market share of four-rotor professional-grade image-taking drones, and other followers have failed to surpass. If you want to break through Xinjiang, you can only find another way. Small-sized portability is a way, but it is limited to the technical bottleneck and has not made much progress.
Yang Jianjun now remembers to work with Qualcomm staff to make the drones into a small process, and suffer from technical breakthroughs. At the end of August last year, the team of Zero and Qualcomm worked overtime for more than half a month. Qualcomm even sent two engineers from the United States to work overtime during the day and night, but whether or not they can use Qualcomm chips to make a flying thing is still Unknown, "I felt that I was about to give up." Yang Jianjun recalled to Tencent Technology.
Initially, the starting point of Yang Jianjun's pocket drone was "one shot", only to be able to take some static pictures, which is one of the different directions of drones. "The reporter went to grab the news, was able to shoot some unexpected events, and took out the drone from the pocket to capture an aerial angle. It is an exclusive secret weapon." However, the portable requirement to be small is a great challenge.
American chipmaker Qualcomm has some ideas and plans for drones. Based on the 801 chip, it integrates functions such as image, CPU, communication and flight control to form a motherboard, which makes the whole core component greatly smaller. The size of the motherboard is 58x40 mm. . "But can you make it, who is his customer?" Yang Jianjun thought that Qualcomm did not know. Qualcomm is a world-class company in terms of mobile communication and chip integration. Looking for some domestic drone companies to open new breakthroughs in integrated motherboards, many people refused. When Yang Jianjun was found, Yang Jianjun agreed to cooperate with Qualcomm by virtue of his sensitivity to drones.
Yang Jianjun is the first to use an integrated motherboard. As the first cooperative company, there are many technical pits. The zero-degree algorithm and operating system can not be installed into the chip platform after Qualcomm integration, and some interfaces, tube corners and the like are very laborious. The zero-degree engineers and the engineers from the United States worked together for a week to solve the core flight control. In August last year, the aircraft finally flew up.
It was already a little over the morning and everyone was very excited. American engineers sent emails to the headquarters to report good news overnight. Then, just before the National Day military parade, when the Beijing no-fly control was the most strict, the follow-up commissioning and flight could only be indoors. Later, Yang Jianjun learned that solving the problem of flying is only the first step. The aircraft has changed from 1.2 kilograms to 200 grams. It is really a small product and there are still many problems to overcome.
There are many loopholes in the earliest operating system, which can easily lead to sudden crashes. After the aircraft became smaller, the heat dissipation became a headache. The aircraft was photographed during the flight, and the image function was fully opened. Compared with the use of the chip by the mobile phone, the power consumption increased sharply, and finally it was solved by internally adding a fan.
Even adding a GPS chip to a small airplane is a major challenge. The first generation of HoverCamera, which uses the Qualcomm platform's zero-infinite portable drone, gave up GPS and more scenes were flying indoors.
Yang Jianjun insisted on leaving the GPS function. If there is no GPS, the lens only recognizes the ground, the speed is slow, and drift occurs when the reference target is seen. The uncertainty is increased and cannot be applied outdoors. The cost of leaving GPS is that the program will be complicated, the cost will increase, and the battery compatibility requirements will be higher.
The GPS of the mobile phone only needs a general position, the error is large, and the place where the positioning is not prepared is calibrated by the map. The aircraft is different, there are no other auxiliary sensors, and the tolerance is only half a meter. Just because GPS itself is highly sensitive, it is a very weak signal receiver. GPS signals fall from the sky and experience a lot of wear and tear. Yang Jianjun needs to amplify the signal, and at the same time, he must find a way to shield the interference caused by battery radiation, high-frequency main chip and memory DDR operation. To balance between volume and signal reception. There are technical difficulties here.
Solved the signal problem, and then solved the problem of unclear shooting. The DJI drone itself is as large as the washbasin. It can eliminate the impact of aircraft tremor on the camera by placing a three-axis gimbal. On a small pocket drone, a three-axis head is installed, which is very large. This problem was finally solved by Yang Jianjun and the team using their own electronic image stabilization method.
To put it simply, the head of the plane suddenly slammed up. The camera was originally to look at the front. The head went up and looked up. The electronic image stabilization method is to make the image very accurate according to the attitude of the aircraft. The overall movement, so that the image the user sees is still stable.
In March 2016, Yang Jianjun had been able to put the drone into his pocket and spent more than two months debugging and perfecting. Officially released on May 25, "The same day with the Xiaomi drone," Yang Jianjun remembers. The difference is that the Xiaomi drone soon experienced the bombing incident, and the overall plan turned to cooperate with Qualcomm. And Yang Jianjun’s drones have sold more than 10,000 per month.
Yang Jianjun is thinking about a bigger application scenario. He found that Dobby can not only take still pictures, but also use it for photography. At the same time, "the user base has become more extensive, not only for journalists, but also for ordinary people." In June and July of this year, Yang Jianjun further clarified the product definition and style of play.
He slowly discovered that continuous video within a radius of 20 meters is currently blank. Portable drones for ordinary people, climb to the top of the mountain when traveling, or at the lake, the drone can shoot a video that others can't take, and expand to the angle that people can't reach with the selfie stick. You can also enrich the trajectory, preset different shooting movement routes and angles. After the video is shot, put it in the mobile app, output it to the US beat, Mito Xiuxiu and second shot for simple editing, and finally share it through social tools such as WeChat. Thereby, the difficulty of the user is reduced, and the user stickiness is increased.
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