The three most critical factors to enable development and manufacture of drones in Africa are:
- A rapid, diverse supply chain for components
- Training to develope unstabilized piloting skills
- Support for legal testing and training with locally-made drones
As long as a drone design is mature and every component is precisely specified, it's simple enough to keep a stock of parts on hand despite a long delay in supply time. However, when you are developing a new drone design, the exact list of parts needed is not known. If you realize you need something new or different—say a battery with a higher current rating or a propeller with a lower pitch—progress can stall for weeks or months. Those of us developing drones in Africa are wearily familiar with the process of messaging friends and colleagues asking "Who's coming from abroad in the next few weeks and can bring a bag of motor mounts?" Designers in high-income countries can often count on delivery of uncommon parts in a matter of days.
We could pre-order a wide variety of commonly-needed components and keep them in stock in a tech hub. This would allow drone developers to progress much more quickly. However, they would only be able to pursue the designs made possible by the particular mix of components on hand, limiting their creativity and ability to experiment.
As an alternative—or perhaps a supplement—to the inventory strategy, we could partner with airlines, agencies or companies whose staff frequently travel internationally, or cargo companies to establish a quick supply chain. Many drone parts are fairly small and light, and can be easily carried in hand luggage. Allowing drone developers to order components from the full range of products available online and facilitating the importation of these parts to Africa would allow them to experiment more quickly and broadly.
A newly-designed airframe cannot usually be flown autonomously before the autopilot software is tuned. If a drone designer is able to fly an unstabilized prototype, currently available open-source flight controllers are capable of "learning" the flight characteristics of the new airframe using sensors to determine how the aircraft reacts to the pilot's control inputs. After a few minutes of manual piloting in "Autotune" mode, the flight controller is capable of stabilizing the drone and— assuming a number of things go right—taking over for the pilot.
You could argue that a $12,000 European-made commercial drone is usually comprised of $500 worth of parts and $11,500 worth of tuning and configuration. If an African drone developer has the skill to fly an untuned airframe, she can build one from a few hundred dollars worth of components and do the tuning and configuration herself, allowing her to compete with the European drone manufacturer.
Drone training programs offered in Africa almost never teach unstabilized piloting skills. Most teach the operation of expensive commercial drones, often using only the fully autonomous modes—activating the drone with the push of a button—rather than piloting by manipulating the control surfaces. This "training" enables the students only to operate expensive, fully-configured foreign-made drones. An alternative to this would be training on inexpensive hobby-grade Remote Control (RC) planes, which teaches remote pilots to directly fly the aircraft, using the motor, ailerons, rudder, and elevator to maintain airspeed, pitch, bank, altitude, and bearing. In other words, to fly. This enables the students to fly not only the specific airframe used in the training, but any similarly-configured craft, including one they may design and build themselves.
Most current and proposed regulatory regimes in African countries are ill-adapted to support local innovation and development.
It is difficult to obtain permission to fly, and even more difficult to obtain permission using a new or non-standard aircraft. We certainly don't argue that people should be flying untested aircraft over populated areas, but in order to enable African drone development, it is critical to provide a path to compliance for testing and training flights that it not prohibitively complicated and expensive.
It may be difficult to influence legislation (though we should not neglect any opportunity to convince African legislators to provide a pathway for their own citizens to compete with international drone manufacturers). Under the current legislative regimes in many countries, the cost and complexity of obtaining permission can be distributed by creating and supporting drone associations that provide legal coverage and insurance for their members.
If an African drone developer is required to obtain her own certification, she will—at best—spend time and money on certification that she could be spending developing and flying her drones (at worst she won't be able to fly legally at all). A national drone association can work to obtain its own certification on the basis of a general set of procedures that all members are bound by. The drone association can negotiate a certification that allows the addition of new airframes within certain parameters (weight, power, etc); individual drone designers are still responsible for creating the specific operatons manuals for their new airframes, but are not required to go through the entire process of certification for each minor modification. The general procedures (pre-flight checks, training requirements, altitude restrictions, safety buffer distances from inhabited areas, etc) remain constant and adherence to them is a condition of membership.
Any donor that wishes to support African drone designers should consider investing in support for such associations, lowering the barriers to entry for individual drone developers.