New Team on the Block: DJI

Even with a global workforce of over 8,000 people and 70% percent of the global drone marketplace, DJI remains quick to point out that just over 10 years ago, they were a single office startup.  That’s part of what interested them in joining the Pennovation community.

 The Pennovation Center, with its mix of tech startups, researchers and innovators, aligns perfectly with DJI’s vision of technology transfer from lab to market.  “We believe that collaboration between a world’s top academic community [Penn] and an industry leader will help create a thriving eco-system”, says Zhiyuan Li, Director of DJI at The Pennovation Center.

 DJI's inventor garage at Pennovation is dedicated to using their expertise and development platform to better support renowned academic researchers from PERCH (on the Center’s 3rd floor) to push the boundary of technology, together. Moreover, enterprise developers can use DJI’s hardware and software development kits (SDKs) as building blocks, plus their own domain knowledge and innovations, to build their business workflows and data pipelines rapidly, and to tackle the unlimited possibilities of drones for good.

 Just last month, with sponsorship from DJI and Qualcomm, the GRASP (general robotics, automation, sensing & perception) Lab of Penn and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology successfully hosted the first International Symposium on Aerial Robotics at the Pennovation Center. The symposium attracted over 100 participants from universities, governments and industries. DJI gave a live demonstration of their latest drone technology, Spark, and their developers’ platform and SDK. 

“DJI's consumer products have made it possible for end users to focus on creating unprecedented contents instead of the platform. Now, with our strong and smart hardware and SDKs, we are enabling developers to focus on solving more real-world problems without worrying about the tools”, says Zhiyuan.

 Keep your eyes out for DJI - this is just the beginning!