Future Scope: Chris Anderson

The U.S. government is expected to allow commercial drone operations in 2015, which has already helped to spark a burgeoning market for small, cheap robotic aircraft. Chris Anderson, former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, has been at the forefront of the industry, first by starting the popular DIYDrones.com website, and now as founder and CEO of drone maker 3D Robotics. His company, launched in 2009, is based in California and has manufacturing facilities in Tijuana, Mexico. He sees agriculture as one of the biggest potential global markets for drones. Here he explains why he thinks this is so, as well how a dad with a spare weekend became one of the most prominent advocates of affordable drones and began mass producing them himself.

How did you get interested in building drones for the masses?

It’s simply a case of parenting gone horribly wrong. I have five children, and I’m always trying to get them excited about science and technology and it’s hard. It’s video games versus test tubes, and video games tend to win. At Wired we were fortunate enough to get these cool products in every week for review. On Friday nights if no one had claimed a product I would take it home to try it out on the kids. One Friday there was a Lego Mindstorms robotics kit, which hadn’t yet been released, and a radio-controlled airplane. I thought this would be awesome. On Saturday we’ll build a robot, on Sunday we’ll fly a plane. On Saturday we built the robot, and discovered that Hollywood has kind of ruined robotics. We built it, and then it slowly rolled toward the wall and bounced off. The kids were like, “You’ve got to be kidding! We’ve seen Transformers. Where are the freakin’ lasers?” On Sunday we took the plane to the field and I crashed it into a tree. The kids thought this was totally predictable, that Dad’s science projects had once again failed. And I was just thinking, “How could that have gone better?” I thought, “Well, what would have been a cooler robot?” And the answer is a flying robot. And, “What would have been a better-flying plane?” And the answer is a robotic airplane. So I Googled “flying robot,” and the first result was “drone.” Then I Googled “drone,” and the first result was “autopilot.” I Googled “autopilot” and the first result was a lot of math that I didn’t understand. I said to the kids, “Look, one last experiment. Let’s build an autopilot out of Legos, the Lego Mindstorms kit, and put it in this plane.” And that’s what we did on the dining room table one Sunday night, and today that Lego drone is in the Lego museum in Billund [Denmark]. It worked. It was kind of amazing. It was, like, it should not be possible for a father and his kids to build a drone out of toy parts on the dining room table. The kids lost interest, of course instantaneously, being kids, but I got chills.

What’s next for drone technology?

The simple answer is smaller, cheaper, faster, better. That we’ve basically hit the personal computer moment in our industry. Which is to say, [just as] there were mainframes before, there were military drones before from aerospace companies that cost millions of dollars, and now we’re making [the drone equivalent of] personal computers. It’s just gotten to the point where they’re easy enough to use and cheap enough and reliable enough that regular people can use them rather than roboticists. I think we’ve just turned the corner and made it possible for regular people to ask the question: “I could have a drone. What could I do with it?” And I suspect that the answers that users come up with collectively over the next decade will dwarf anything that I can think of right now.