Emissare Part 1: Pressing play

Have you ever used a universal remote? My folks have one, and I hate it with all my heart. It is capable of so many things, and yet it sucks at many of its most common tasks. So although it technically replaces three other remotes, it's mostly just encouraging them to read a book instead.

Ideally, someone would produce a remote that had minimal controls for their TV, cable box, and stereo receiver. It would be perfect—until it also had to turn on the LaserDisc player. Then they'd be waiting for the remote manufacturer to release a new version with the exact feature they wanted (while hopefully changing nothing else).

Emissare was founded because the drone market faces a similar struggle. Closed-source products like those from DJI are amazing at what they do. But if you need additional capability, your only hope is that it's included in their next release, or a third party finds a way to offer it. Conversely, open-source products are capable of just about anything, as long as you don't mind integrating everything yourself. We're aiming for something in the middle: high value, low friction.

To begin with, our software makes drones more approachable. As a user, you don't need to learn anything about waypoints, flight modes, or stall speeds. You communicate with the vehicle using natural language, asking it to perform high-level objectives. The drone should feel less like a tool, and more like a team member (probably more like an intern at this point, if I'm being honest, but you gotta start somewhere).

Secondly, we're putting a new type of intelligence on the vehicle: basic decision making. We're not pretending to build super-intelligent robots that can solve any problem, but they will at least be able to take a few forks in the road (more on that later).

Thirdly, we're designing our software with expansion in mind. There are a handful of core capabilities that we believe will be crucial to the industries we're looking to serve, and we will develop those ourselves. But the goal will always be to have a system that can be enhanced without becoming bloated. Features will be treated more like smartphone apps or browser extensions, rather than being buried in the source code.

It's going to be a long road, but there should be some interesting stops along the way. In the meantime, if you're curious what it's like to deploy an aircraft in only a few sentences, hop over to talktoadrone.com.

Catch you next episode.

- Greg