Squadrons of drones flying into the future
Intel branches out from its chip business with new technology
Intel set a new record last year in a category not normally associated with the world’s biggest semiconductor firm — 500 precision-flying drones creating an aerial light show in the skies above Germany.
The Guinness World Record performance was a big moment for the Intel Shooting Stars drone team, which is the Santa Clara chipmaker’s version of the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels flying team.
The drones have performed recently for the Super Bowl halftime broadcast and at Walt Disney World in Orlando.
It doesn’t seem obvious that Intel, a company that led a Silicon Valley revolution in personal computer processing, should have a showy drone squadron. But the company plans to enter the commercial drone business in the coming weeks.
The drones also help market the technologies that Intel is developing as it branches out of computer boxes and into the broader, rapidly growing universe of mobile, Internet-connected devices.
“The Intel you knew is transforming,” said Anil Nanduri, general manager of Intel’s drone development team and vice president of the firm’s New Technologies Group. “That’s an important message, and these are ways to see Intel on the outside.”
For decades, Intel marketed itself as the brains on the inside of a desktop PC, using the “Intel Inside” logo as its signature slogan.
But people have shifted from PCs to mobile smartphones and a plethora of ordinary devices that are microprocessor-enabled and Internet-connected, such as lightbulbs, door locks, thermostats and garage-door openers.
So Intel has made bold moves to get itself inside those devices, such as paying $15.3 billion to buy self-driving vehicle technology startup Mobileye. Intel has also announced partnerships to get inside smartwatches from New Balance and Tag Heuer.
People have shifted from PCs to smartphones and connected devices, such as lightbulbs, door locks, thermostats and garage-door openers.
“All of these are going to generate a lot more data than today’s devices,” Nanduri said. “Drones are (part of ) another set of devices that are going to be processing huge amounts of data.”
Intel declined to disclose how much it is investing in drones.
Having a drone flying team is “not an unnatural move for them,” said Gerald Van Hoy, a Gartner senior research analyst for drones, robotics and military/aerospace technology. “They’ve already established a foothold in the Internet of Things. They’re just leveraging the stuff they’ve learned and developed into this new platform.”
And while chip-making rivals Nvidia and Qualcomm are also pushing into the same markets, “neither of them have a drone company,” Van Hoy said. But like Intel, they make processors that can go into drones and robots.
The Shooting Star drones are basically self-flying robots that use Intel navigation sensor technology to avoid crashing into people, objects and each other. Intel is also using technology and workers acquired in 2016 when it bought German startup Ascending Technologies.
Intel has three drone labs — in Santa Clara, Germany and Finland — where a growing but undisclosed number of workers tap into the company’s expertise in robotics, microprocessors, data management and cloud computing. Intel often tests the drones at Sunnyvale’s Baylands Park.
The four-propeller machines, known as quadcopters, have LEDs that can create a light show with about 4 billion color combinations.
At the Super Bowl in February, the 300 drones served as a backdrop to Lady Gaga’s halftime entrance. They formed a giant flying American flag before morphing into the Pepsi and Intel logos. A catch: While it looked real for TV audiences, it wasn’t live. Due to federal flight restrictions, the drone show was actually recorded days earlier.
The drones, which can be monitored by one or two people, have also flown at shows in Australia, Mexico and Austria. The world-record flight came in November, with 500 drones flying over a field in Germany.
Last month, Twitter user Sasha Hoffman captured a video of the drones performing at a private event hosted by Amazon, which also proposes using drones for deliveries.
“If you thought the Super Bowl drone light show was cool, this tops it,” Hoffman tweeted.
The light shows can look similar to fireworks, but “it’s a lot more than fireworks because you can do storytelling, you can animate and you can put logos in the sky for marketing,” Nanduri said.
Intel is not in it just for the show. In the next month, the company will begin selling a heavy-duty, eight-propeller drone called the Falcon 8+, which is designed for industries that want to automate human processes such as inspecting power lines, construction zones or oil and gas rigs. Intel hasn’t disclosed the price of the drone, which can carry cameras or thermal imaging equipment.
Intel is also selling drone developer kits to other drone makers.
Gartner’s Van Hoy projects that the commercial drone market could be worth about $6.6 billion worldwide by 2021, with about 50 to 60 percent of revenue coming in the United States.
Although Intel is producing its own branded drone, Van Hoy believes the commercial drone market will be fueled by companies offering drone services such as data-gathering and analysis. Many potential drone customers say, “We don’t want to own a drone, we just want the data,” he said.
Intel will have competition. Drone makers like 3D Robotics of Berkeley have abandoned the consumer market to focus on construction, while French drone maker Parrot laid off about onethird of its employees earlier this year to focus more on mapping, agriculture, inspection and other commercial markets. Last month, Menlo Park drone maker Kespry announced that John Deere Construction would begin marketing its products to construction customers around the world.
Intel isn’t the only company with synchronized drones, either. Prenav of San Carlos won an award two years ago for a video showing its precision-flying commercial drones.
But Intel is becoming the biggest company in an industry that’s “still kind of Wild-Westy, still trying to figure out just what the market is,” Van Hoy said.
Nanduri believes synchronized drones could become valuable for another purpose — search and rescue operations.
“Looking for a lost hiker at night, you could fly 50 drones, fully computer-automated,” Nanduri said. “These are the kinds of things that keep my passion going.”