Is there a better way for Enterprise Companies to manage large drone fleets?

Today’s guests believe there is.  Lorenz Meier and Kevin Sartori are Co-Founders of Auterion, an enterprise drone software platform.  Auterion’s goal is to be the drone software platform of choice for enterprises and drone manufacturers, while accelerating the industry by driving forward open standards to create a common, future-proof roadmap. This gives everyone involved, whether vendors or buyers, confidence that they will achieve a return on their investment, and access to a wide choice of partners and integrations in an open ecosystem.

Lorenz Meier, holds a Ph.D. in drone software architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. In 2008 Lorenz created and released the PX4 autonomous drone autopilot to the open source community. Lorenz is also the creator of Pixhawk, MAVLink and QGroundControl, today’s most commonly used flight control hardware and autopilot software. He has been working in the drone and robotics industry for the past 10 years and in 2017 was nominated MIT 35 Innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review for the development of PX4.  Lorenz is also a board member and community director at Dronecode, the organization that defines the open source standards in the UAV industry.

Kevin Sartori holds a Master in Robotics from ETH Zurich and an MBA from UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business and has been working in the drone industry since 2008 when he was researching optimal control algorithms as part of the early Pixhawk team at ETH Zurich. In 2014, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and joined 3D Robotics, first as an Enterprise Product Manager and later as Senior Product Marketing Manager for Site Scan. He helped the company transition from a consumer hardware company to an enterprise Software as a Service company and lead the marketing and channel sales efforts. Today at Auterion, Kevin combines his consulting skills with his knowledge of the drone industry and technology to help drone manufacturers and drone service providers adopt new technologies, change business models, and bring new products to market.

In early 2020, Auterion release Sky Node, which when combined with Auterion PX4 enables drone manufacturers to rapidly enter new markets by making their products compatible with an ecosystem of payloads, components, services, and workflow integrations. It short, it gives companies the tools they need to deploy large fleets of drones.

In this edition of the Drone Radio Show, Lorenz and Kevin talk about Auterion’s open source platform, Sky Node and its applications and how enterprise companies can better manage a fleet of drones.