One of the major research questions we have been working on for nearly two years, is figuring out how to bring down the cost of drone production; both the labor and components costs. While we still have a lot farther to learn, some time in the last few months we crossed a major milestone without noticing it. We are staring to have the “welcome to the drone factory” moments in the lab.
While construction is still obviously bespoke, the milestone is fairly exciting. It not only means we are getting the whole process dialed in to where it can be released open source, but it is opening doors for future projects using swarms of autonomous drones, and multi semi-autonomous ROVs working together.
The Lanternfish design is being initially developed for open source release. As such the first units are being made from easily obtainable hobbyist electronics modules. The most time consuming element of construction is now soldering and debugging those units. The electronics design is still in active development, but the first task after release will be developing a single custom board shrinking most of those modules down onto a single Pi-hat.