An Israeli startup called wants to make adding new features to your drone as easy as downloading apps from an app store.
The company, called Percepto, is currently raising funds on Indiegogo. Percepto will offer a camera that can be mounted to your existing drone. You can then download apps to your mobile phone that can interact with the camera in different ways.
The company has already built apps for the device, including one that can automatically follow and film a particular object. But the idea is to let other developers join in. The company plans to open source its machine vision platform, enabling developers not just to build their own apps, but improve upon the vision software itself—the heart of the technology that allows drones to operate on their own.
Those could include collision avoidance, urban navigation, gesture control, or other applications that the company hasn’t even thought of yet. “The idea is that because this is an emerging technology it’s not clear what the use cases are that people will want in the future,” says co-founder Dor Abuhasira.
The Drone Race
Abuhasira, an electrical engineer by trade, and his co-founder, mechanical engineer Raviv Raz, came up with the idea about two years ago on a snowboarding trip. They were using a GoPro camera to record their action but realized what they really wanted was a drone that could follow their movement and keeping figures in focus. Determined to make the idea a reality, they recruited another friend, Sagi Blonder, to help them build the software.
Initially, they focused only on building their own software, but soon realized that the machine vision problems they had to solve to build object-tracking were relevant to a much wider range of applications. That led them to the idea of creating a platform that other developers could build on. But they decided to go further than just releasing a set of tools for creating apps for its own app store. By releasing the source code, developers will be able to create their own apps — or even their own hardware — based on Percepto’s technology without any need to use the company’s app store at all.
Abuhasira and company expect Percepto to be used mostly for recording video and playing games at first. But he thinks in the long-term, as drones find their way into more and more of the world—from agriculture to construction to search and rescue—its uses will expand dramatically.
The most obvious comparison to Percepto is Intel’s RealSense 3D camera system that wowed audiences at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, and is already being built into drone company AscTec’s Firefly line. But Perceptro isn’t just a camera. It’s also the software and algorithms required to enable the drone’s vision. Abuhasira claims that Percepto’s system is better suited for outdoor and long-range use than what Intel demoed earlier this year. Plus, it’s open source, so anyone will be able to contribute their own improvements.
“We hope [open source] will give us an edge in the competition because it’s definitely a race,” he says.
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