Michael Robbins will leave the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International on September 30 and take over as president and CEO of the Semiconductor Industry Association on October 1. AUVSI named chief operating officer Heather Lee acting president and CEO effective the same day, and its board has opened a search for a permanent successor.

Robbins spent three years telling American drone operators that their industry needed what the chip industry already had. He is now going to work for the chip industry. DroneXL has been covering him since March 2024, when Utah public records showed AUVSI putting written support for an immediate purchase ban on Chinese drones in front of a state senator while its own president told a webinar audience the association opposed exactly that.

Robbins asked Washington for a CHIPS Act for drones and got the ban half instead

The semiconductor comparison was Robbins’s own. In a February 2024 AUVSI webinar he said the association wanted federal industrial policy for drones modeled on what Congress did for chips. “We would like to see a chips act for drones,” he told the audience.

That package never arrived. What arrived instead was the restriction side of the same playbook: NDAA Section 1709, the Section 1260H designation of DJI, Section 805 procurement cutoffs, more than a dozen state bills, and on December 22, 2025, the FCC sweeping every foreign-made drone and critical component onto its Covered List. American operators got the tariff-wall economics without the factory-building money. Robbins is leaving for the industry that received both.

AUVSI counts roughly 7,500 members worldwide. Even if every one of them flew in the United States, that would be under two percent of American Part 107 certificate holders, a point DroneXL made in 2024 and one worth restating now that the association’s advocacy has reshaped what the other 98 percent are allowed to buy.

AUVSI’s public position on Chinese drones never matched its lobbying letters

AUVSI’s public statements and its letters to state legislators say different things, and the paperwork is public. DroneXL published the Utah documents in March 2024, the Law Enforcement Drone Association rebutted Robbins in writing a year later, and the pattern repeated in California weeks after that.

On February 27, 2024, Robbins told an AUVSI webinar that nothing the association supported would ban Chinese drones for service providers or public safety, and that any suggestion otherwise was false. A Government Records Access and Management Act request in Utah surfaced a January 23, 2024 email from an AUVSI government affairs manager to Senator Wayne Harper expressing support for Part 12 of SB 135, the section prohibiting purchases of drones made or assembled by a covered foreign entity. That is a ban. It was submitted in writing five weeks before the webinar.

LEDA president Jon Beal answered a Robbins op-ed in February 2025 by accusing AUVSI of “overt gaslighting” on Chinese drone legislation, and DroneXL covered that rebuttal in full. Six weeks later the association’s regulatory counsel sent California lawmakers a letter opposing AB 1160, which DroneXL took apart line by line: contested labels, no dates, no breaches, no dollar figures. Pilot Institute and 51 Drones pulled out of AUVSI’s annual conference over this stretch of advocacy.

Robbins welcomed the FCC ban, then defended a version broader than AUVSI says it asked for

Robbins welcomed the FCC’s December 2025 Covered List action within hours. His statement argued the United States had to build its own drones instead of depending on Chinese supply. Five months later he defended a policy his own association says it never requested.

Opening XPONENTIAL Detroit on May 12, 2026, Robbins acknowledged AUVSI had lobbied for a narrow, risk-based Covered List implementation and that the White House went far wider. He then made the affirmative case for the wider version, citing reindustrialization goals and pre-conflict industrial-base contestation. DroneXL was in the room. DJI, whose Ninth Circuit petition against the FCC was already pending, was not on the stage to answer.

By February 2026 the same approach had been ported to a new sector. AUVSI launched a Partnership for Robotics Competitiveness on Capitol Hill using language nearly identical to its 2023 drone campaign, with Unitree, AgiBot, and UBTech standing in for DJI. DroneXL documented the reuse at the time.

Heather Lee inherits an open FCC docket and a drone registration database for sale

Lee, AUVSI’s chief operating officer, becomes acting president and CEO on October 1, and the board has announced no end date for its search. She arrives with comments closing September 2 on the FCC’s proposal to pull previously authorized foreign drones and DJI’s Ninth Circuit challenge still undecided.

She also inherits a product DroneXL reported on three weeks ago. AUVSI is selling subscription access to a drone registration intelligence database built from more than one million U.S. registrations, priced between $5,000 and $8,500, with a stated use case that includes tracking foreign equipment penetration by manufacturer. The FAA itself stopped publishing that bulk data. Every operator who bought a DJI fleet is now a data point AUVSI can sell, and the buyers include the companies competing for that operator’s next purchase.

Robbins said in SIA’s announcement that it is a privilege to join the association and represent an industry foundational to American economic strength. AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su, this year’s SIA board chair, said Robbins brings the vision and experience the semiconductor industry needs. Neither statement mentions drones.

DroneXL’s Take

Give Robbins this much: he opposed Florida’s immediate ban, he opposed the Countering CCP Drones Act as written, and he pushed for transition periods when plenty of lawmakers wanted none. Those were real positions and they helped real public safety agencies. I have never argued otherwise.

The problem is what the transition-period position turned into. Vic Moss and Kyle Nordfors both told Robbins to his face on that 2024 webinar that a transition period is a ban with a delay fuse, because no agency spends money on a fleet it will have to replace. They were right. By December 2025 the FCC had banned new foreign drones outright, by May 2026 Robbins was on a Detroit stage defending a sweep broader than the one AUVSI says it lobbied for, and by August 2026 he has a better job at the association whose industrial policy he held up as the model. American drone operators are paying higher prices for less capable hardware. The CHIPS Act for drones is still not a bill.

My read is that this exit is a promotion earned on the drone file, and the drone file is not finished. Watch who AUVSI names permanent CEO and what the association files in the FCC’s previously-authorized-equipment proceeding this fall. The board has announced a search and no timeline, and AUVSI has not said whether its next leader will keep defending a Covered List broader than the one it claims to have wanted. That silence is the thing to track, because the position was never voted on by the operators it affected.

Sources: Semiconductor Industry Association announcement, August 18, 2026; AUVSI announcement of Heather Lee as acting president and CEO, August 18, 2026; Robbins’s post on X; AUVSI webinar transcript published by DroneXL, February 27, 2024.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.