Our First Drone Product

Kavrous Technologies was set up to be a home for my various technology initiatives, and one of those is an effort to help close a gap in the consumer drone market. That gap has been driven by policy and regulatory changes intended to steer Americans toward locally designed and assembled technology. There are a lot of problems with these policies, primarily because they are largely anticompetitive and limit the choices Americans have when selecting products. Being "Made in America" isn't a promise of quality; it indicates only a product's origins. Go back 50 or 60 years, and jokes such as "don't buy a car made on a Friday" were common because of how people viewed the workforce in their own country. Nevertheless, gaps in the market present opportunities for domestic companies to fill the void.

What is harder to replace or replicate is the decades of engineering prowess at companies like DJI, which have spent millions on research and development to make their products what they are today. Simply blocking the sale of these drones doesn't mean that a company like Kavrous will instantly earn consumers' trust. We're new to the market, but we're working to develop a platform capable of doing a large portion of what companies like DJI have accomplished.

Kavrous is starting from a very humble position, and we simply can't say, "Here is a drone; good luck!" We haven't yet shown what we can do. Our first product is intended to demonstrate our capabilities and, more importantly, prove that we can create something usable and trustworthy. Part of that effort is documenting what we're making from the beginning.

K-0 Founders Edition: Dev Kit

One way to demonstrate the quality of what we're making is to ask whether someone with no background in our product can use, develop, and enhance it with the tools we build and supply. K-0 is a proving ground for that idea. Not only are we developing our own ESC, but we're also developing a flight controller, a flight-control stack, and our own Drone Abstraction Layer to make new components fit and work naturally. These things take time to develop. The K-0 ESC alone—the Kavrous 2-E ESC—has required more than a couple of weeks to compile the bill of materials, begin sourcing parts, and receive the initial prototypes.

Kavrous 2-E ESC for dual brushless DC motor control

This development doesn't happen in a vacuum, either. The regulatory landscape is changing, so the list of considerations grows almost every two weeks. Some of these changes won't take effect for a year or more, but at the pace of new product development, that is practically tomorrow.

Over the coming months, we plan to share updates on the development of the K-0 Founders Edition. In this post, we're sharing some initial renderings of our Kavrous 2-E ESC because it is the foundational component of our first limited product launch. We won't say too much about it yet because some details of the 2-E are still evolving. We can say, however, that we are finalizing the main design details so we can begin testing whether it will work for what we want to prove. It also provides a catalyst for expanding the tools we have on hand, and that's important.

As we get closer to manufacturing the first batch of K-0 Founders Edition dev kits, we'll need to make sure we can build them at scale. This supports our mission not only to design our products in the United States, but also to assemble and eventually manufacture them entirely here. This mission isn't meant to suggest that foreign-manufactured products are bad. Rather, it recognizes the value and merit of manufacturing our technology here in America whenever possible. Heaven forbid another pandemic causes global supply-chain disruptions that we can't handle.

We're looking forward to sharing more as development moves forward.

Seth Kerr

Founder and CEO

Kavrous Technologies