Auterion and Maxon have announced a new partnership to integrate Auterion’s Skynode with Maxon’s drone motors, providing drones with improved avionics and motor integration built with western components.

With the U.S. ban on certain Chinese-made technology and the talks about data privacy, the search for NDAA compliant drones has extended beyond Government drone users only to most of the U.S. drone industry. This has led to a marketing opportunity for US drone manufacturers to sell their “Made in the U.S.” drones. However, Auterion has posed the following question: Is “Made in the U.S.” the same as NDAA compliance?

“Something may say ‘Made in America’ but you need to look very closely at the supply chain,” Dave Sharpin, CEO at Auterion, told Forbes. “If you look at, say, a camera, it may have been assembled in one country but some of the components may have come from somewhere else.”

Auterion’s and Maxon’s new partnership tackles this subject by giving their customers access to drone systems made with western-made components that enable joint customers to build drone fleets that are free of parts from listed entities and Chinese-made components. This partnership is also focusing on making drone development, operations, and fleet management more efficient, safer, and more secure, at dramatically reduced costs.

Built by the people who created and still maintain the Pixhawk industry reference standard, Auterion’s Skynode is a plug-and-play solution made in the U.S. designed to enable enterprise operations and reduce the time and cost of designing, integrating, and maintaining hardware and software. It features built-in Ethernet, USB, WiFi, and 4G support, pre-integrated camera and payload lineup, a container platform to host onboard apps, and connects to online services in the cloud.

Used by NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance rover to explore Mars, Maxon now wants to use its high precision systems on drones on Earth, as they “will play an important role in the automated future”, according to Eugen Elmiger, CEO of Maxon.

“I am very pleased that we are entering into a cooperation with Auterion, sharing our knowledge and experience so that we can better serve customers in the dynamic drone market. Their expertise in drone software coupled with our 60 years of experience as a global motor and drive specialist will generate promising solutions for the future.”

“Maxon will be able to leverage the connections to drone manufacturers of Auterion, and Auterion will be able to offer to its customers best in class motors that are already integrated with Skynode,” Kevin Sartori, co-founder at Auterion, said. “This is all about showing how we are bringing together an ecosystem of partners that work together on open standards to solve customer problems with the best solutions that are unattainable for proprietary providers. We are choosing the best partners to offer a complete set of components to build state of the art drones.”