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Drone maker Event 38 reaches to the skies
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: October 26, 2017
Drones, drones, drones.
Hobby quadcopter drones, military spy drones, commercial drones, drones delivering Amazon orders — drones are filling the sky.
Akron commercial drone maker Event 38 is a part of a rapidly growing industry that government reports estimate to reach $12 billion in sales by 2020, after hitting $8 billion last year.
Event 38 (https://event38.com) makes four sizes of unmanned commercial drones and develops the software to use them primarily for people who need data from large tracts of land. They sell their products across the globe.
“Our drones have been used primarily for mapping,” said Jeffrey Taylor, founder of Event 38. “Although people use them for a number of other things. Our cameras have 10 times the resolution of satellites or small airplanes, and they are a lot cheaper and easier to use.”
In mapping, drone images are downloaded to a thumb drive and then directly to a computer, Tayolr said adding that it is a result of software developed by Event 38 and the camera company so that the results can be used immediately.
Taylor founded his company in 2013 which currently employs eight people, first working and developing his ideas in California after he received his aerospace engineering degree from Case Western Reserve University. He said that he had always been interested in drone technology stretching back to his college days, and into a job he took with SpaceX in California and a later job in San Diego, where he worked on developing a drone operating system.
The company’s name, in fact, comes from a SpaceX NASA project name.
The company sells two basic models ,one that is much smaller and one that is much larger. The products have been used to map farmlands and old battlefields, to deliver medicine in the jungle and to fly security missions around property borders, among many other missions.
In the Amazon jungles, WeRobotics, a nonprofit working in the jungle, uses Event 38 drones to deliver medicine to tribes in need of rapid delivery, especially of antivenins.
There are upwards of 50 snakebites a month in the bush, said WeRobotics’ Patrick Meier, and Event 38’s drones help the residents enormously.
“Anti-venom was flown about 40 kilometers away,” said Meier. “A regular boat (canoe) takes up to 6 hours to complete the journey. Our (Event 38) drone took around 35 minutes.”
Meier also said that a previous drone, which cost about 10 times the amount of the Event 38 drone, wasn’t up to the task.
The drones, said Taylor, are virtually indestructible and are considerably less expensive than most commercial drones currently for sale.
The basic drone bodies are made of Styrofoam, Taylor said, to which various motors, cameras and sensors are attached. They fly with a proprietary companion computer onboard which can pre-process photos and can be controlled by remote or by an app.
The drones can be easily field repaired using duct tape and glue, he said.
That statement is backed up by one of Event 38’s first customers, Chet Walker of Archaeo-Geophysical Associates LLC, based in Austin, Texas.
The company uses the drones for large scale archaeological mapping.
“We use drones for everything,” said Walker. “We have had them at 14,000 feet in the Andes and used them to map all of Wake Island, looking for World War II artifacts,” as well as projects like finding lost cemeteries in mountains in the U.S., lost Native American sites and war artifacts on old European battlefields.
Walker also praised the drones’ crash-worthiness, especially when he is at altitude or otherwise far away from a repair shop.
“Just tape them and glue them and they are good to go” after a crash he said. Walker also mentioned Event 38’s 24-hour customer service.
Event 38’s two new drones will fill in other product niches, said Taylor.
“The smaller drone (called the “Scout”) is particularly for countries where there are legal size restrictions for drones,” he said, citing Canada and Australia as two such countries.
The Scout is only about three pounds. The only use of the large one to this point has been in perimeter security, he said.
Next in development are drones that have longer ranges and maybe someday drones that can be satellite-controlled.
For now, said Taylor, “business is good. Things are going well.”
The entire sky is open to this dynamic Akron business.