Where does the data in the platform come from?
Federal UAS Registration Intelligence is built on U.S. drone registration records legally obtained from the Federal Aviation Administration, with all personally identifiable information excluded. The FAA-provided file contains, for each registration, the registration date and open-text fields for city, state, drone manufacturer, and model; commercial (non-recreational) registrations also include an optional registrant-organization field.
What qualifies AUVSI to enrich the data like this?
AUVSI brings two capabilities no data aggregator can match. The Uncrewed Systems and Robotics Database already contains proprietary equipment specs, costs, and technical details that don’t exist in raw FAA filings so that registration records can be enriched with platform intelligence unavailable anywhere else. And as the convening authority for the autonomy ecosystem, AUVSI maintains direct relationships with the companies behind these registrations, allowing us to validate and enrich organizational profiles in ways a pure aggregator, working from public records alone, cannot.
Why is AUVSI, an advocacy organization, offering this product?
AUVSI’s research has produced uncrewed systems market intelligence for nearly two decades, including the Uncrewed Systems and Robotics Database, Federal Defense Spending Intelligence and Uncrewed Insights. Federal UAS Registration Intelligence extends that work, giving manufacturers, investors, service providers, insurers and government planners a clearer, data-grounded picture of the U.S. market.
How is AUVSI able to create this database?
AUVSI Research cleans, de-duplicates, and standardizes these records — for example, reconciling variant spellings of the same manufacturer or drone model — and enriches the manufacturer and model entries with equipment specifications and country-of-origin information from AUVSI’s Uncrewed Systems and Robotics Database (USRD), a catalog of publicly available platform data. The organization counts come directly from the registrant-organization field in those records, and fleet sizes are a count of the drones each organization registered. AUVSI has no back-end or system-level access to any FAA database and uses no restricted, credentialed, or law-enforcement source.
Does the platform contain any personal information about individual operators?
No, this platform does not present personal information about individual drone owners or pilots. The FAA excluded any Individual names, home addresses, phone numbers, or email addresses from the source records. The platform uses only legally-obtained data, with individual PII removed and it does not use the single-aircraft individual-lookup channel or any credentialed access path.
Who can buy the platform, and what can they do with it?
The database is intended for manufacturers, dealers, investors, analysts, services providers, government, and policymakers. The platform is available by subscription. Subscribers use it for market sizing, competitive and geographic analysis, territory and prospect planning, compliance measurement, and airspace and risk planning. Because it contains no individual data, it cannot be used to target or identify individual operators. Manufacturer and country-of-origin analysis is presented at the aggregate and organizational level.
What does the data show?
The dashboards show organization-level and aggregate information: registration counts, geographic distribution, manufacturer and model share, and fleet sizes by registered organization. The organizations shown are businesses and institutions; individual operators are not identified and cannot be looked up.
How does the platform handle privacy and personally identifiable information?
Federal privacy rules — specifically the FAA’s DOT/FAA-801 system of records — protect the personally identifiable information tied to a drone registration, such as an individual’s name, address, and contact details. Those protections are exactly why Federal UAS Registration Intelligence does not contain that information.
Does the platform track drones or pilots?
No, the platform is a periodically updated market-intelligence dataset and is not a tracking tool. It cannot be used to find, follow, or surveil an operator.
How is this different from public aircraft registration or ADS-B flight data?
Manned-aircraft registration (N-number) records and aggregated ADS-B flight data have long been public, and businesses build market and situational-awareness tools on them. Federal UAS Registration Intelligence applies the same principle to publicly available uncrewed-systems data, aggregated for market analysis — while specifically excluding the individual personally identifiable information that federal rules protect for small-drone registrations.
What does “registration-level data, not estimates” mean?
It means the platform is grounded in actual FAA registration records rather than survey-based market estimates or modeled projections. The registration counts, organization counts and fleet sizes are tabulated directly from those records.
Who can I contact with questions?
AUVSI Research welcomes questions about the platform, its data and its methodology. And can be contacted at research@auvsi.org.
