We spent September 1 to 3 at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, at Booth #1011. This was our first time exhibiting at Commercial UAV Expo. Below is a summary of what we saw and what people told us.
Most visitors fell into three groups. Service providers who fly for clients, usually in surveying, construction or utility inspection. In-house teams at companies that own their own aircraft, often in energy or public safety. And manufacturers and software vendors, some of whom came by to compare notes rather than to buy anything. We were not demoing hardware, so people who stopped at our booth had usually read the sign and wanted to talk about software. That made for longer conversations than we expected. A fair number ran past twenty minutes.
Two things stopped traffic at #1011. The first was the fabric backdrop. We had gone back and forth on whether a printed wall was worth the shipping, and the answer turned out to be yes. Several people told us they walked over because they could read it from the aisle, which is not something we had thought much about when we were arguing over the layout.
The second was the app. We had an interactive demo running on a tablet at the front of the booth, and people picked it up on their own without being asked. That changed the shape of most conversations. Instead of us describing how the copilot handles a mission, visitors were tapping through it themselves and asking about the specific thing on the screen in front of them. Our team ended up doing less pitching and more answering, which is the better version of a trade show conversation. A number of people came back on the second or third day, sometimes bringing a colleague.
The questions were mostly about behavior. In rough order of frequency:
• What does the system do when conditions stop matching the plan?
• How does it tell the operator what it is about to do, before it does it?
• How fast can a human take over, and what state is the aircraft in when they do?
• What happens on a degraded link?
• Does it work with the aircraft and ground station we already own?
That last one came up more than we anticipated. Very few people were interested in switching platforms.
We also got direct skepticism, which was useful. More than one operator said they had seen autonomy demos that worked on a prepared site and failed on a real one. Two people asked, in different words, how they would explain our software to an insurer or a regulator.
