Visit to a Tijuana Drone Factory

 It’s 7 am in the morning on Dec 6 and I’m in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box in San Ysidro, CA, waiting for someone called Guillermo I know only from a couple of brief email exchanges.  Guillermo is going to drive me across the border into Tijuana, Mexico to visit a robotic drone factory.  As in a factory that makes robotic flying vehicles, not a factory where robots make other robots, at least not yet.  I scan each passing vehicle hoping to identify Guillermo in a flash of extra-sensory insight, a project with a low probability of success given the throngs of Mexicans milling around the parking lot and the nearby tram terminal.  Guillermo shows up shortly in a white truck and mutual recognition is surprisingly instantaneous (try that, Google Glass!), leaving me no opportunity to try out my limited Spanish with the locals - “Guillermo no esta aqui, dónde está la fábrica de aviones no tripulados robot”, anyone?  We breeze through the border to find ourselves in front of the 3D Robotics factory, located in an industrial park about 5 minutes from the border, where my adventure starts…

I leave my car in San Ysidro on the US side of the border.  At $8 / day, parking is dirt cheap.

The 3D Robotics factory is located in Tijuana about a mile and a half from the border.

 

 

The 3D Robotics factory building looks like it could be anywhere in Silicon Valley.

 

The interior has multiple rooms, including a CAM workshop for cutting metal parts…

 ….a circuit board manufacturing and drone assembly room…

 

…where finished drones are churned out ready to ship.

 

Here, Guillermo describes the features of a drone that is ready to ship (click for video).

 

The Arduino-based Autopilot circuit boards are printed in sheets like postage stamps…

 

…from electronic components that are imported in spools from China….

 

…and tested for defects on the spot.

 

The GPS chips are imported from Switzerland and use signals from up to nine satellites for precision.  Here, they are being tested as part of the assembly process.

 

There’s a dedicated Testing Lab to perform additional quality control tests…

 

Here, one of the test engineers walks through the components of a typical drone (click for video)…

 

…and then describes the mission planning and flight control software, which uses Google Earth (click for video).

 

After I am done with my factory visit, Guillermo drops me off at the border crossing, where I stand in line for an hour…

 

…and give $2 to a nurse collecting money for charity (I hear later it’s a scam), before getting through US immigration.

 

After lunch, I head to the 3D Robotics’ R&D office in San Diego, to see what they do up there...

 

Among other things, R&D is working on ultra-strong carbon fiber propellers (they spin at 4-12,000 RPM!)…

 

….and different drone configurations, including this redundant, “dual propeller” quad rotor design.

3D Robotics’ Arduino-based Autopilot supports multiple configurations, including fixed wing aircraft and ground vehicles…

 

…like this weird craft that looks like a WWII B17 bomber crossed with a Predator drone…

 

…and this fun-looking Rover…

 

I have no idea what this is supposed to be!

 

If I were to summarize the key takeaways from my visit to 3D Robotics, they are as follows:

1.      Mexico, especially Tijuana, has a decent pool of both hardware and software engineers and is an alternative to both China and India for product development and manufacturing

2.      3D Robotics has shown that you can build a for-profit business using open source designs for hardware, electronics and software, and continue to receive the support and collaboration of the open source community

3.      The drones they are a-comin’.  3D Robotics has about 50,000 customers world-wide and growing.  Many of them are hobbyists, but increasingly, they are business customers like construction companies and (ahem) “security” firms.