The idea is that its general across a massive domain (i.e. finance) and able to do the entire jobs of human financial experts (not just one part of their jobs). Don't you think that applies here?
I think having this plugin be a natural extension of an existing product was very useful, as well as the large interest in our project once we announced it publicly
Really excited to bring hedge fund level economic modeling and portfolio analysis to everyone. Our incredible but small team built PortfolioPilot and has spent a lot of time over the last few weeks ironing out issues with the plugin. You can try it out in ChatGPT today and please give us your feedback - that's the only way for us to improve it!
Sounds like the package delivery part was more for journalistic flair than the core market. Collision avoidance beyond-line-of-sight is useful for pipeline inspection, agricultural surveys, search & rescue, forestry management, and many more use cases!
One of the major advantages of the Iris system is being able to deal with other aircraft in the national airspace (especially non-cooperative targets like you mention). It means that any system that will actually be useful will have to be able to see and track objects correctly further than 500m away, like Iris can.
The system is much more than just a basic SLAM algorithm, allowing it to have a full picture of the world, tracking both static and dynamic obstacles that the drone may encounter.
The Iris Automation system can see much further and track dynamic objects like aircraft, balloons, birds, etc. This article does a pretty good job of summing up why we need much more than the "bumper solutions" you mention above: https://medium.com/@alexharm/why-situational-awareness-is-ab...
One of the main reasons we choose to go with simple cameras is because it can be so much cheaper than LIDAR and RADAR sensors. Won't disclose the actual price, but it is definitely a lot cheaper.
Definitely! The core of our product is software so ideally we just sell software licenses (much higher margins). Turns out there are a lot of drone companies that want a plug and play product though, and don't have spare processing power around to run our software.