A pair of EU policy wonks, bored with merely talking about innovation, have put their speeches and reports to one side and launched themselves into the start-up world of machine-controlled drones.

Kumardev Chatterjee and Nicholas Zylberglajt are better known in Brussels for running talk fests under the banner of the European Young Innovators Forum.

Now, after 18 months of development (including annoying neighbors in Anderlecht with back yard test flights) their drone company Unmanned.Life will be featured on-stage at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Their goal, Chatterjee told Playbook, is to be the first company to deploy fleets of machine-controlled drones to do anything from reinventing how packages are moved around warehouses to inspecting dangerous structures like nuclear plants, oil rigs or earthquake damaged buildings.

Chatterjee said major projects already on the company’s books include development of a pilot for the first drone-based parcel-sorting center, with Dutch company PostNL, and participating Facebook’s global Telecom Infra Project.

“A lot of people (in Brussels) have only seen me in the policy context,” Chatterjee said. But as a computer scientist, he also helped build the Air Traffic Management Software Architecture for Europe’s Single European Sky initiative.

“Now I have married my interests in deep tech, innovation, entrepreneurship and policy,” he said.

In fact, that’s what makes Unmanned.Life stand out: They’re one of the few startups making a strategic play out of cooperating with EU regulators.

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Today, the EU sets rules for drones weighing more than 150 kilograms, but officials are working on plans to regulate the sort of smaller recreational flyers and unmanned aerial vehicles that Unmanned.Life intends to use for deliveries.

Nicholas Zylberglajt is a member of an EU “expert group” on drone regulation, and with that experience on his team Chatterjee said he is deliberately avoiding the more aggressive style of disruption favored by the likes of Uber. “If we don’t have a discussion with regulators we could be stopped in our tracks,” he said. 

Friendly relations between one company and regulators, however, won’t change the overall social impact of drones.

“Let’s not fool ourselves: robots are coming. If we don’t do it someone else will,” Chatterjee said. “Getting a swarm of drones flying around like in science fiction changes human work. We need to be upfront about it. We are taking humans out of the loop.”

If Chatterjee succeeds, he won’t just be be sidelining a few humans, but possibly millions who work in warehouses today.

“This is all about industrial deployment. Fourteen-year-olds can fly drones as toys, that’s not interesting. Making it deployable at an industrial scale is interesting,” Chatterjee said.

— Joshua Posaner contributed reporting

— This post was updated to reflect that Nicholas Zylberglajt rather than Kumardev Chatterjee is a member of the EU expert group on drone regulation.