Ask HN: Why are drones a thing so lately

[nothrowaways]

Drones have become the go-to solution for various aerial tasks recently, but they haven't been around for that long.

What's surprising is that drones didn't require any groundbreaking new technology to emerge.

So, why did they take so long to become mainstream?

[JohnFen]

Drones have been around for a very long time. Longer than most of the people here, I bet.

What's changed is economics. Drones were initially incredibly expensive, but the price of electronics, motors, and batteries have come down and become smaller and lighter over time. Only fairly recently have those prices fallen to the point where normal people could afford them, and well-funded people could afford large quantities of them.

[farseer]

Because in the 90's for example, your typical lithium ion battery would have been too heavy for an electric quadcopter. The electric motors for each of the quadcopters fans also became very efficient recently (< 20 years). That is why this category of drones were not viable 30 years ago.

Gas powered remote control flight has certainly been available for a long time, however commercial GPS for navigation and high bandwidth wireless connections and cameras for video feed certainly weren't available. These RC planes used to be a novelty, you'd fly within visual line of sight only. Now you can bomb targets 1000 km away with them with decent accuracy as shown in Ukraine - Russia war.

[rossdavidh]

I knew people who used drones 10 years ago or more, but they were called "RC" (i.e. remote-controlled) aircraft. They were also pricier, and required more expertise to fly. Like many technologies, they had an exponential takeoff, which means a long period of slow improvement (including getting cheaper, lighter, and easier to control) that bootstrapped on itself. It is very much like how computers were around for decades before the microcomputer revolution of the 1980's.

[thrw42A8N → rossdavidh]

10 years ago it was already drones. RC is more like 20. But you're right overall.

[OliveMate]

Not a genius but I'd speculate that it's a mix of the following in the 2010s:

- Boom of small & lightweight HD cameras, your GoPros and the like.

- Proliferation of video editing tools – and more importantly skills – as internet-based video platforms grew more popular.

- Quadcopters (and other RC aircraft) became cheaper and more stable with each passing year.

Each of these democratised aerial photography – something you could only do if you hired an aircraft and souped-up camera to go with it, an insane expense. Then like any other technology, the more people use it, the more uses we find for it.

[DuckConference]

We sourced a basic GPS module for a student project in the late 2000s, it had an antenna the size of a charcoal briquette, drew a bunch of power, wasn't all that cheap, and took a while to lock on to satellites. I can only imagine how crappy and expensive an accelerometer would have been at that time.

The smartphone revolution was a gamechanger for the price and availability of GPS receivers as well as accelerometer/gyro systems.

[ActorNightly]

Ex aerospace engineer here:

Biggest reasons are a) availability of ARM based SOCs that have some pretty good processing b) Lithium batteries

Back in 2000s, lithium batteries were coming out, but werent as safe. Being into the RC world, you would see plenty of battery fires. If you wanted to be safe, you generally went with NiMH batteries, which were heavier.

In terms of aerodynamic efficiency, its much more efficient to move large amount of air slowly rather than small amount of air fast, and the efficiency gains from this are higher than efficiency gains from running multiple small motors rather than one large motor.

Additionally, there were some notional autopilots microcontrollers, but they weren't really that good in terms of being able to do accurate AtoD sampling.

Thats why RC helicotpers were used heavily as "drones" back in the day, with the bigger ones running on gas engines that could support heavier payloads that included a stabilizer autopilots. With a helicopter, you also used to have a stabilizing flybar that could give you stability in place of flight controller with a gyro.

Once Lithium batteries became safer, cheaper, and higher energy density, and microcontrollers like STM32 with Cortex chips came out that got some A2D samplers into the GHZ range, drones became more viable due to mechanical simplicity (controlling motors rather than a complicated swash plate linkage), especially since the body can be flat carbon fiber pieces that are very cheap to make and are very strong and light.

[2rsf → ActorNightly]

How about lower cost better quality sensors? accelerometers, GPS etc.?

[lunarcave]

Also the conflict in Ukraine led to a popularisation of low cost drone mods and their capabilities.

Especially in the context of recon and military deployments.

So they’ve captured more of a mindshare I guess.

[reducesuffering → lunarcave]

I believe it was actually the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020) between Azerbaija and Armenia that originally alerted the world's militaries to the impact and utility of modern drone warfare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Nagorno-Karabakh_War#Dr...

[bjourne]

Chinese mass production is my uneducated guess. I can get a drone with a 4K camera and 10 minutes flight time for 60 € which is absolutely ridiculous. 15 years ago the price would have been 100 times higher or so.

[runjake]

They required:

- Cheap, highly accurate, low current draw accelerometers.

- Cheap, low current draw and miniaturized GPS modules.

- Cheap, low current draw wi-fi radios with excellent range.

- Cheap, low current draw, high resolution, high quality cameras.

All of these are recent advancements.

tl;dr: All of the needed ingredients became cheap and low current draw.

[justsomehnguy → runjake]

This one, along with:

batteries, compact and capable of high load

power circuits (both in power and the size)

demand

compact electric engines capable of high torque with high load for the long enough time

[bediger4000]

If by "drones" you mean quadcopter type RC aircraft, the answer there is that a number of technologies got to consumer level

Brushless DC motors, strong injection molded plastics, PID control algorithms, rechargeable battery energy density, fast CPUs, communication protocols, maybe geolocation via GPS. Without any one of these (and probably 5 or 6 more) quadcopters wouldn't be feasible.

[nothrowaways → bediger4000]

Agree with consumer level.

[bediger4000 → bediger4000]

It occurs to me to say injection molding of any plastic has gotten better probably due to numerical simulations of molten plastic. Injection molding parts of any type of polymer used to be a black art, requiring a lot of trial and error. Parts had simpler shapes and thicker walls in the 1990s than they do now. That's very important to making quadcopters light enough to fly, but still durable.

[aristofun]

They actually do require some complex technologies to become cheap enough (batteries, motors, performant electronics and radio transmission).

[JSDevOps]

People think it’s all to do with AI watch any action movie in the last 10 years