Jason H. Lu ๐บ๐ธ
@JHL_Express
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Building US-made drones stacked with ML GPUs. Founder ceo @ Flyby Robotics. Aviation & space nerd. ๐ซ studied stuff @yale.
Joined June 2021
For folks who recently found my Twitter -- I'm the founder of @FlybyRobotics. We make American-made drones that bring the power of @nvidia GPUs to the sky, enabling a full machine-learning stack in flight. Hereโs why and how we're doing this.
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Taiwan could do the funniest thing by holding a referendum to become the 51st State of the United States. 1. Huge boost to US and Taiwan tech/Econ lead.2. New 3rd most populous state in the Union right after Texas.3. Freedom of 23 million Taiwanese secured for all posterity.
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After months of work, a Flyby F-11 drone can be turned into a massive 3D scanner. We just digitized our test site with a 12-minute flight.
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Memes aside, the game theory behind this is: . 1. China (PRC) plans to invade Taiwan .2. Main thing stopping Taiwan from being invaded is deterrence (own strong military, US potential defense) .3. If ur Taiwan, u want to maximize deterrence .4. How you get peak deterrence?.
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Damn, donโt want to fight with rabois but for folks in American hardware spaceโฆthe Exo Blackhawk 3 looks spooky identical to Husban Ace 2. Husban is huge in Shenzhen. Theyโre not as well known as DJI but is one of the top Chinese drone companies.
You can now purchase an American owned & operated drone vs. launching a spy balloon for the CCP.
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In 2024 alone, Ukrine used/sourced 1 million DJI Mavic 3s. Most U.S.-based drone manufacturers cannot produce more than a few thousand units per year. If China is expanding globally, theyโre the ones with the massive drone swarms. Itโs 2025, US need to wake the fuck up.
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ArduPilot (the best world wide open sourced drone flight controller) has done more damage to the Russian nuclear triad than any software from the big U.S. defense primes . Open source >>> close systems . Why? It empowers end users.
18 years after @Jrdmnz @jason4short and I created ArduPilot, here it is destroying large parts of the Russian air force. Crazy.
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Raising $500m seed to build Baktoid Combat Automata, product line includes: . The B1 - low cost attritable combat humanoid .The B2 - premium heavy assault grenadier humanoid.The Droidekas - shielded mobile infantry suppression fire unit
<6 months until a startup gives one of these humanoid robots an AR-15 and raises a $500m seed round.
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@ThomasHoufek Btw Hawaii Statehood was only 1959, at the time it only had a population of 600,000 and a economy on the bottom list. It still ranks only 41/50 states. Taiwan would be in top 10 by economy. And top 3 by population.
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It took ludicrous amount of work, but our doodle lab RF streaming on high res payload is now finally look proud. Doodle labs is stupid hard to get it to work well on a system, but if you keep on throwing yourself on a wall, you can get good results.
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1960s American engineering: โlmao what if we strap a B-36 bomber engine to a train?โ . *Breaks North American rail speed record still not topped
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@aphysicist The product is just 24 yrs too early. The proliferation of Replicants in 2049 makes the Orb mini an absolute necessity in daily life.
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End customers want indestructible drone bodies . We got u . Tooled with @atomic_inc proudly made in Michigan USA
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DJI is the hardware version of Tiktok. - Gets American operators addicted. - Steals data, intelligence to PRC. - Hollows out domestic drone production capacity. Every American dollar going there is funding the Chinese military industrial complex.
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๐บ๐ธ +1 US drone microfactory about to come online
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For once, this drone footage here on your feed isnโt from DJI. Itโs taken from our 10 person LA-based made in America drone startup ๐บ๐ธ
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Palantir ๐ค Flyby Robotics . The future is American-made massively powerful ML drones. Excited to show the world what weโve been working on with @PalantirTech at @scsp_ai . May 8th at 3pm in Washington, DC. We got passes for friends of Flyby if you want to come to @scsp_ai.
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Weโre a few escalation away from each nationโs top drone developers needing to get secret service protection.
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If you have โRoboticsโ in your startupโs name you should build actual physical robots or electrical components and not just โSaaS for robotics companiesโ
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1). If youโre an US-based drone manufacturer, you really should not be using Chinese made batteries (not only in principle but also China can ban you from buying too) . 2). Jesus skydio has been using Chinese-made batteries ๐ฆ.
SCOOP - Biggest US drone maker ๏ฟฝ๏ฟฝ(@SkydioHQโฉ which supplies Ukraine with drones for intelligence gathering) faces supply chain crisis after China bans company from selling batteries to the group.
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How CCP conquers without firing a shot: . -Flood the west with cheap state subsidized drones & robotics .-Western drone industrial base dies overtime. Quality and capacity GONE.-China gains massive technical edge with insane volume and quality for the next conflict.
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@wilks_isaac Even earlier bro, 214 BC. Lingqu Canal via corvee laborers. Warring States period.
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I'm hiring for a role. No link. Just dm me your resume. Read thread for reqs. Drone Production Engineer. Will report directly to me. I will teach you how to assemble, how to fly test, whole stack. If you're good, you will oversee others next. $100k salary. In-person LA only.
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Andruil did $343m revenue per yr in 2023 .Meanwhile, Lockheed is here making $1.3bn PER WEEK.
Over the last 12mo, Lockheed made an average of $1.3B per week
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Step one of sales is to understand your customer
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@ThomasHoufek But sir you just described the debate that every US state went through when they go through the process of admitting to the Union after the original 13 founding states. Alaska House vote was 210 for - 166 against. ~44% voted against.
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Build drones so good it takes the Mandate of Heaven away from Shenzhen drone companies.
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Why I get up everyday and do what I do. Despite the immense pain in my line of work. This is my manifesto. 1). The common man does not understand how far behind our drone industrial base is from China. Many have given up and accepted the decline. I believe we must resist this,.
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Hereโs a quick thread on philosophical design differences between @FlybyRobotics and DJI. Weโve designed the F-11 to be an actual open platform for machine learning at the edge. Here's how we're building this:
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Discovering your product in the wild on twitter is crazy lol.
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@FrontalForce The drone being used in this video is a Chinese DJI M350 wrapped in blue with a water spray and propeller guard attachment. Still Chinese tech.
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This is how you should verify all FEA impact modeling
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The cycle: . Engineers: *builds something fast, test real world asap to understand what needs fixing . Public: โhaha look at how the pad got completely destroy, absolute fail, starship will never workโ . Engineers: *fixes issue.
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Maybe thereโs more info not public but man it doesnโt feel super great seeing a Chinese-made drone promoted (hence the thread tho rabois plz donโt nuke me).
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Announcing the @FlybyRobotics Drone Hacker Prize. We believe deeply in supporting new builders in the American drone ecosystem. Launching the Drone Hacker Prize: $1k to the most important or coolest new projects in the UAS space. (1/2)
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@1258632 Taiwan could wait and get invaded by PRC anyways or seize the initiative to build greater deterrence. Being the 51st State is as deterrent as one can get. This might be the path to avoid war.
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Thinking of a Type II Kardashev Interstellar Fukuyama End of History United States
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if this gets 100 likes, we'll do an aim bot demo.
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The F-11D can now be controlled with an PS5 gaming controller for the cost conscious warfighter who needs to field in mass. C2 link is with Silvus jam resistant military radio
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Here is a photo showing the quality - yes literally taken on the our drone
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Thank you @johncoogan and @jordihays for including my post about CCP drone battery reliance. At @FlybyRobotics weโre dedicating our resources to setup drone battery pack manufacturing for ourselves then open up for others to use our batteries too.
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Ironically it has been the diplomatic position of the Peopleโs Republic of China to advocate for the Principle of Self-Determination of People.
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So we put Llama 3 on an F-11 (fully locally on the GPU, no wifi), one of the guys named it Jerry and now the drone doesnโt want to be called any other name
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Throw a wave of armed humans against drones, the drones blow up and the humans die. But it takes a few hours to make drones, 18+ yrs to make a human. Whoever makes the best drones win wars.
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โIf some [hardware made in China] is [too cheap to be true], you are the product.โ.
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Want this.
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If you can do that to pagers, what do you think is in those CCP made drones?.
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Friday afternoon. Team building cool shit. Infinity mirror with your droneโs high zoom camera
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Obviously Sunday is the best day to test your 3-axis gimbal
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GPU Drones. Hundreds of thousands. Millions.
People ask me what's next. The GOAT points the way. Physical AI. Embodied Agents. Robotics. That's what's next.
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As Taiwan is being surrounded rn, hereโs what the CCP equivalent of USINDOPACOM, PLA Eastern Theater Command is putting out to their own people. The campaign strategy focus is dehumanization. Taiwan = bugs, pests, demons. Account has 2.4m followers.
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Just met a gigachad Anaheim CA machine shop . -*gets cold call we need an urgent low tolerance part 9am in the morning .-*makes it in 2 hours, sends us pics that he already did it BEFORE we even paid him or got our order. The dude just builds.-*refuses to charge extra . Legendary.
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If this doesnโt happen weโre in the wrong timeline.
This is a plan for the 4th Department of Defense academy at the Presidio. The Frontier Academy will have 3 dedicated colleges for Space, Cyber, and Robotics. I think this will be great for the tech ecosystem and the country. ๐บ๐ธ๐ช. Feedback welcome! ๐งต1/16
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Blasting N A T O W A V E tonight cuz we gotta celebrate Finland officially made it
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How to fight back .1). Recognize and identify this is foreign adversarial strategy. Itโs a subtle attack prior to active conflict. 2). Two can play this game. Rain contracts, tax incentives, and loans to ur own drone industrial base.3). Tariff and ban the shit out of the CCP.
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Back in 2007, family and I hastily left China after we were tipped off. I step out of a 20 hour flight from Shenzhen to Anchorage, Alaska. On American soil for the first time. The feeling going from oppression to freedom is indescribable. But this is what it felt like. ๐บ๐ธ
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DRONES YOU CAN PUT ANY ML ON IT PROVEN. Flyby Robotics F-11 with @PalantirTech first GPS-denied VNav POC. Now imagine swarming, targeting, mother-shipping FPVs, the possibilities are endless.
In modern warfare, GPS cannot be relied upon. #Palantir's Visual Navigation (VNav) enables #drones to navigate without GPS, using onboard cameras and compute. Partnering with @FlybyRobotics, an American-made UAS developer, VNav ensures accurate, autonomous missions even in
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@Rucas1972 @Noahpinion Iโve read Chinaโs 5 yr plans. Made in China 2025. Chinese industrial doctrine. And gained my own view on what theyโre doing. I did studied under 2 Yale economists who won the nobel, Nordhaus and Schiller. So I think I have some basic knowledge about markets.
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Itโs so smooth that it feels like a video game and not streamed through a radio. This is operating in congested ISM frequency band btw.
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The ideological winner during technological inflection points is important. It determines wether things like these will be built by democracies or dictatorships
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NATO should donate $1BN to ArduPilot developer community honestly.
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@SpencerMac101 I can do it if someone throws me $100m. I will have verticalize all components (flight control chips, motors, esc, batteries) and do the miniaturization myself to retain margin. Zero off the shelf parts. And then build a robot factory that makes 100,000 units per year.
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@shaunmmaguire @shaunmmaguire sequoia (and defense minded others) should donate massively to the ArduPilot developer community. This victory is massively enabled by open source community-driven software.
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US manufacturing is behind, an exhibit. And why YOU, dear founder need to make it better.
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@aaronlucas21 Instead of saying โmany such casesโ at this point we should just say โALL cases are suchโ.
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@MorganBarrettX Industrial drones with no Chinese electronics & enough computational power for AGI
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When the part came in and it looked like it came from House Harkonnen
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Forget El Segundo and SF, real founders build on Geonosis.
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For those that call investing in American dynamism a new fad, sir how many satellites can your shitcoin put in orbit? Please tell me more about the effectiveness of NFTs on countering main battle tanks. Really appreciate it.
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The upcoming great power conflict between democracy and totalitarianism will be won by contributions from the hackers of this room.
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The true pioneer of today is someone who isnโt afraid to actually mine the gold, not just sell shovels on the side lines. ๐บ๐ธ.
I am excited to announce Durin!. Durin is my plan to solve the biggest challenges in mining, discovering mineral deposits necessary for national security and clean energy in record time and cost efficiency.
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I know you know enterprise software, but sir have you heard about the booming business that is heavy-duty farm equipment?
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US defense companies after Xi Jingping appoints himself dictator for life
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Candidate wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.
I'm hiring for a role. No link. Just dm me your resume. Read thread for reqs. Drone Production Engineer. Will report directly to me. I will teach you how to assemble, how to fly test, whole stack. If you're good, you will oversee others next. $100k salary. In-person LA only.
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When Elon says โWhat did you get done this week?โ โ this week in particular really brought that quote in new context.
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1960s engineers: โLook on my Works, ye Mighty, and despairโ
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