3D Robotics

3D Robotics (3DR) is a United States drone company founded in 2009 in Berkeley, California, by Chris Anderson and Jordi Muñoz, who met through the DIY Drones online community that Anderson had started for aerial-vehicle hobbyists.

The company built consumer and commercial multirotor and fixed-wing drones on the open-source ArduPilot autopilot platform. Its products included the IRIS+ (September 2014), the modular X8 quadcopter and Aero-M fixed-wing mapping platform (both November 2014), and its best-known aircraft, the Solo, a dual-computer camera drone built around the GoPro Hero action camera and released in May 2015.

In March 2016, 3D Robotics announced it would stop building hardware after what a former employee described to Forbes as a costly, unsuccessful push into the consumer market. The company pivoted to enterprise drone data software for construction, engineering, mining and government customers, operating its Site Scan platform with a smaller team than its hardware-era headcount.