For years, the aerospace industry operated under a fairly strict set of rules. When a company built an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, they designed every single piece of it from scratch. The frame, the flight code, the cameras, and the handheld controllers were all engineered to work exclusively with one another. It was a closed loop. If you bought that drone, you were buying into a closed ecosystem. While this proprietary approach gave manufacturers total control over thei

Introduction Open-architecture UAVs are no longer a nice-to-have feature – they are the only way forward if you want aerial power that can adapt, survive and win in the real world. Unlike closed, proprietary drones that lock you to one vendor’s ecosystem, open-architecture UAVs use published standards and interchangeable modules so that sensors, payloads, propulsion and software from any company can work together instantly. Firestorm Labs, based in San Diego, has built the mo