A Massachusetts company has set up an office in Baltimore County to showcase its unmanned drones.
American Robotics is leasing part of an office building at 936 Ridgebrook Road in Sparks. A patch of dirt behind the office will be transformed into a demonstration ground to fly unmanned aircraft. The company is hosting live demonstrations at the space during a grand opening event on June 12 and June 13. The firm moved into the location in January and has around 12 employees in the area.
CEO Timothy Tenne said the company targets defense, government and commercial customers, not the consumer market. The American Robotics drone is meant to carry various payloads depending on the mission, like a camera to help a police department find a person missing in the woods. The company uses a “drone in a box” system where it returns to a charging pad after a mission is complete.
“It's no different from your Roomba,” Tenne said. “When you're at your house in the morning, you look at it in its charger and think, ‘Wow, this thing is just taking up space.’ But then you come home at night and your floors are clean.”
The drone is best suited for flights in a 5-kilometer radius, Tenne added. By federal law, a pilot has to observe the mission for safety reasons, often making it difficult for drone companies to find customers, since long flights are often impractical if someone has to follow along in a car the entire time. American Robotics is starting to make progress on fully autonomous flights by earning a waiver that allows its vehicles to fly without the drone being within the direct physical line of sight of a pilot in Massachusetts. Tenne believes making the aircraft fully autonomous is essential to finding customers since people mainly purchase the product for its potential to quickly gather information.
“Nobody wants a drone. They want automated data solutions,” he said. “So when they're launching a drone, whether they're doing an inspection of a bridge or perimeter surveillance for public safety, they want live streaming video, pictures, data. They want to be able to make reliable, actionable, accurate, timely decisions.”
The company chose to expand to Maryland because of its proximity to Washington, D.C., where many of its government and military targets are based, and because of its highly educated workforce from local universities. American Robotics is a subsidiary of public company Ondas Holdings, which is based in Waltham, Massachusetts. Maryland has become a hub for unmanned vehicles in recent years with the University of Maryland establishing a large test site in southern Maryland and the Salisbury-Ocean City Wicomico Regional Airport opening an autonomous vehicle center.
Tenne has a long history in the aircraft space. He previously served as the CEO of Nordic Unmanned, which had planned to set up a branch in Baltimore County but instead chose to focus on its core European market, Tenne said. Before entering the private sector, he served as the director of aviation safety at the Federal Aviation Administration headquarters, giving him key insight into how federal regulations work that could separate American Robotics from its competition.
“[A lot of drone companies] don’t understand that they are in one of the most highly regulated industries on the planet behind nuclear power,” Tenne said.
