# Top 10 Do’s while Building a Drone Dock

- Event: NestGen ’22
- Published: March 7, 2022
- Length: 41:53
- Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/-Xt0iqvoo1o/

> The transcript of a recorded NestGen session, for reading or for use with an AI tool. It comes from the video's
> captions; automatic captions can mishear names and terms.

## About this session

Familiarize yourself with the must-haves & best practices of designing & engineering reliable & autonomous drone docks.

## Transcript

**[0:12]** hello everyone and welcome to one of the first sessions at NestGen 2022 top 10 do's of building a drone dock here you learn some of the must-haves and best practices of designing and engineering reliable and autonomous drone docks so great let's jump right into it and to set some context I'd like to recount two key aspects of nitin's opening address that we just witnessed um the kovic pandemic revealed several operational challenges that simply could not have been overcome as efficiently with our automation and the the second thing is modularity right the fact that everything we're trying to do here is to bring door in the box systems to the masses and that means making sure that r d as well can be as open and transparent as possible ensuring that anybody building on any layer of the engineering stack can take away from this session we have two of our best product engineers on today's session they've worked with several docking station partners on a similar mission to reduce cost and increase adoption of autonomous stone systems

**[1:15]** our first speaker havish he studied electronics and telecommunication engineering and has been actively working in robotics since his academic days he's been part of several robotics teams and competitions ranging across national and international levels where he's gained loads of experience and insights at quite a young age highly skilled at several tools and languages 3d modeling and design software havish is proven to be quintessential to FlytBase's success among also went through a similar journey uh you know an illuminas of the most premium engineering college in india indian institute of technology or iit he took keyed interest in robotics and autonomous systems projects during his degree in mechanical engineering highly proficient in several programming languages and deep learning among has played a pivotal role to the success of the robotics department here at FlytBase so it looks like we're in good hands today so I'll let them take over the days havisham all yours all right guys so what what do you think of when you hear the word docking

**[2:19]** station or also you know commonly known as drone dock so we believe for most people what when they think of a docking station they think about a box right which can somehow charge or replenish the battery of a drone once it has come back from its mission now there are several several ways of doing this doing this so swapping like for example the drone comes back with its battery discharged and there's just one fully fresh battery ready to go so it's just replaced and the drone flies away again right or there's other ways where the drone comes comes back and lands and then the same battery is charged through some kind of contact points or that same battery starts through a wireless charging setup so all of these three different options have their own positives and negatives like for the swapping option there is no downtime don't down time because it's almost like a human just changing the battery and going on and when it is back charging using the contact points then you actually have to wait for the duration which might be something like an hour to an hour and a half for the battery to fully charge but they both but you know for this kind of a

**[3:20]** contact point setup it's pretty easy to build it's not really complicated but a battery swapping mechanism is very mechanically heavy a battery charging mechanism you have to deal with a bit of electronics but really not as much now a wireless charging mechanism is even more simpler right because now there are no contact points you just have to hover around you know the nearby area so there are these different kind of charging options that documentation provide and for most people that is what a docking station is it's just a box which can charge the battery of a drone or replenish replenish its battery but when we think of it like that can we honestly go ahead with a box like that to production can we just take a box which can do this kind of an operation and give it to a customer and be like okay now you go ahead you deploy this box somewhere in a remote area and the drone will be able to do autonomous missions because there is nobody required to charge this battery anymore right the the dock the drone can handle it so the answer to that question actually is no while drone uh well battery servicing is a very essential it's actually one of the many pieces that make up the puzzle of drone autonomy it is not

**[4:25]** as straightforward as just that a box should have the ability to charge a drone there are many other challenges and today we'll look at those challenges and to address those challenges what should drone you know what should docking station manufacturers focus their attention on and also how does FlytBase help you with this process so that your product your you know invention and innovation can get to the hands of the customer and go to the market as quickly as possible so moving on to the moving on to the question of what actually does it take to convert a box which can service the battery of a drone and taking it making it an actually auto automated docking station which can help with autonomous drone operations so there are five main pro uh issues that you need to address before you can say I have a fully autonomous system the first is reliability so just imagine right your docking station has been deployed somewhere in a remote area it is going to be you switched on 24 7 it's going to be used for months on it so when it is being do when it is doing that it's so important that it doesn't fail that the that every single

**[5:25]** you know component and part insiders is resistant to failure or if there is some of some kind of failure it knows how to handle it itself because if a person needs to keep visiting that place again and again just to fix the issues faced by the talking station they might as well have that person there 24 7 right no point of any docking station anymore similarly the next one is weather proofing these talking stations are going to be deployed all over the world and we had really have experience of this and we have seen this happening that means the docking station has to handle really a wide range of weather conditions then safety anyone who has worked with lithium polymer batteries before knows that they have they are you know hazardous materials and drones have one and if you have at least so the doc the docking station will have at least one right but if you have a swapping setup then you might have three or four batteries inside your docking station so now you have to be really really sure that if something happens and one of the batteries catch fire it is not going to set fire to the whole building or basically compromise anybody's safety then drone and box coordination right so drone and box coordination is one of

**[6:30]** the most essential components there are for for you to get to drone autonomy like if the box and the drone cannot talk to each other how can they work together to achieve a goal you need some sort of communication between them and finally remote deployments so just you know putting a box somewhere remotely deploying it out there is not enough there is so much more that goes into remote deployments because that documentation is now uh you know thousands of miles away it might as well be the thousands of miles away because that's what our customers want so you get a lot of issue challenges with respect to connectivity and the life cycle management of the offer documentation deployed this far away so let us look at these issues in a bit more detail so let's go with weatherproofing first because this is something that is that is very you know obvious and very uh understandable for more people it's intuitive right so let's take heat how does heat affect it if you had a talking station which was you know uh placed somewhere really in a hot uh place the very first issue you would have is that your processes are overheating and if they were already doing

**[7:31]** some tasks on capacity now it's overheated it's not gonna uh you know go into boost percentage it is not gonna it is not going to uh it's not it's basically you're gonna have performance like it's gonna there's going to be thermal throttling happening right and for example and also with drone batteries it's pretty common to see that drone batteries as soon as you bring them back from charging if you put them back in if you put them on a charging uh pad they're not gonna charge they actually wait until they have cooled down and uh under something like 40 degree celsius before they actually start charging that means it's very important that your documentation does not overheat right on the other hand you have cold like assume you have a docking station which is in cold cold conditions and regions that means you know you can have condensations inside so there are a bunch of electronic systems and components inside the dropping station and just imagine there's a thin layer of water on all of them can you imagine how really bad that is snow will also lead to the same thing which is water ingress snow and drain both of them will lead to the same things of water and ingress right and then humidity all of these are

**[8:32]** issues that a documentation manufacturer has to address now other than the five issues that you can see on the screen there are a couple more for example dust ingress so if you have a docking station that is that can get dust into the system then you can expect some motors or mechanical components jamming or even if you have heat vents jamming out and not sufficient not being able to exhaust the heat properly through the vents and one in one interesting case that we have uh we have personally addressed is that if you deploy a docking station somewhere like in a coastal area then because of the you know the more uh content of salt in that moist air you get a lot more corrosion on the components than you normally do it's not just metallic components which corrodes sometimes it's even issues even rubber and plastics which you have in there which take a bit of a bit of a more than normal amount of beating just because they're placed right next to the sea so these kind of weather proofing is necessary for talking you know this kind of weather is a really important issue that talking

**[9:32]** station manufacturers have to consider then like I said reliability right so in reliability we have the mechanical electrical so you it has to be mechanically rare but the the same particular function that the docking station can do it needs to be done I don't know ten thousand one lakh times before it goes into production so that it's mechanically reliable it needs to be electrically reliable that means no issues of loose connections short circuits of or any of that kind the drone and the rc they also need to be reliable for performing operations right it's not easy uh so what that means is that every time you switch on a drone if you have experience with drones you must have seen right every time you switch on a drone the drone is not going to be like I'm ready to go and ready to fly many times they throw some errors they say I have an error encoded error or I have a imu error how do you handle them now usually if you are a human being right there you know how to handle them because you see that you see the messages of how to handle them on the rc or something like that but this docking station and the drone are deployed a thousand miles away there are no humans but still the docking station somehow needs to handle this issue so

**[10:36]** drone and rc hardware are some things that the docking station needs to you know uh account for its reliability and then drone landing so think about it right so the so you have a docking station which is about maybe three feet by three feet uh you know a width and length in size and a drone just complete submission and now it wants to come back into the docking station is it good every time that the drone tries to land inside rocking station is it going to reliably land every single time or is it going to miss it a few times and just land outside the docking station or maybe just clip the docking station on its way down and damage itself and the docking station so you understand how dangerous that is right so you need a reliable solution for even this problem moving on safety like I mentioned previously lithium polymer batteries one more than one any of them can lead to fire you have to address this it is it is a really it is a danger which can uh which can engage and endanger human lives unauthorized access so you have a system out there which is which is connected to the internet so you

**[11:36]** have to be you have to make sure that nobody can get into it right it's just like your emails you don't want anybody getting into emails similarly you don't want anyone getting into your talking station also physically the talking station has to be robust enough not to let vandals or you know bad actors getting to get into that and to and steal really expensive hardware of a drone and an rc right and you know we have another example of of what can lead to a fire something like a short circuit so going on drone and box coordination drone like I explained to you before so what if the drone accidentally tries to take off when the docking station is still closed the enclosure is still closed the drone won't be able to take off right it's just going to hit inside the docking station something and damage a lot of things might even damage the battery and set it on fire the opposite of this is also true what if the drone is has come for landing but the docking station is closed now the drone can't land on the rocking station so how do you handle this and the last one let us say the docking station was open and the drone did come come for land but somehow

**[12:37]** there was a little bit of an error by by the time it it reached the dropping station so but that error is not enough for the for the drone to fall off but at the same time it is not safe enough for the docking station to close when the docking station tries to close it will crush the drone so in this all of these situations are which you need to understand like which you need to realize in real time operation and stop it from happening you need the coordination between the drone and the talking station not to you know to not let issues like this happen so going on uh so the last one is remote deployments of course like I mentioned previously you have something which is so many so far away if you have a software update how are you going to update updated software how are you going to update this firmware right how are you going to keep an eye on everything that is happening inside the docking station in real time how are you going to control it how are you going to resolve any issues that come up with the talking station remotely and last means connectivity right if you deploy your docking station somewhere really out there in the field how will you provide internet or ethernet access to the documentation

**[13:42]** these are all questions that a documentation manufacturer has to answer he has to uh address and be prepared for it before his box which can service a battery actually go into production and add value as us as a component of drone automation now we'll go on to my dear friend uh colleague my dear friend and colleague amo who will walk us through what can be done to to you know handle these challenges by the documentation manufacturer amok over to you uh great havish and thanks for putting up the key issues and problems that docking station manufacturers have to face day in day out so eloquently today so uh right so as havishas pointed out the enormous challenges that you have to face can be a really daunting list to look at so what we have tried to attempt here is to kind of concise this list and come together with the top 10 dues list that you as docking station manufacturers can kind of look at to and resolve a lot of the

**[14:44]** issues that have mentioned previously so let's tackle this one by one coming to power supply cooling systems so this primarily stems from the reliability issue so as I was mentioned previously there are errors that up in in other systems like you know rd to your docking station or a raspberry pi all of these systems are bound to develop errors when they run 24 7 throughout day in day out so it is very essential that you have capabilities inside your docking station which can power cycle them turn them on and off so that most of these errors be configurational or hardware specific are immediately resolved this also ensures that whenever you have a flight and if these systems have been recycled that means most of these random errors so to say do not occur in flight uh which can be moved to the next one this time right so coming back to feedback based design now this is extremely critical for

**[15:50]** docking station manufacturers to incorporate into their design process and into their manufacturing process what we essentially mean by feedback based design is that when drones and docking stations need to kind of communicate with each other they need to know the status of different systems within each other so that the entire orchestration of an autonomous diabetes system is smooth and for that it is highly essential that docking stations are able to provide feedback on all operations that they are doing uh what we have mentioned here are four very critical operations and feedback not present on these might also might have adverse effects often leading to damages so let us look at them which is essentially your enclosure system so the systems that kind of uh that kind of cover the entire docking station which might be a tray or a canopy kind of structure then there are power cycle systems the ones we talked about in our previous slide which are responsible for power cycling the drone device the rc's the

**[16:55]** other edge devices then you have systems which are responsible for battery service so this might be like a arm which kind of swaps a battery or you might have charging points which charge the battery which is all which is inside the drone and then lastly you have systems that control weather so you might have hvac systems inside your box which is like and special to have feedback on this so let's kind of dive a little deeper into this and look at an example of what my back is so essential so let us say that we the drone is trying to take off and before takeoff it needs to make sure that the enclosure is 100 open so that it has complete access to the surrounding above it and it can now safely perform a takeoff however without feedback and if there is like one in thousand or one in a million chance that the enclosure is let's say half open or did not open we might end up in a very serious accident so hence it is very essential that all of these systems are able to provide

**[17:58]** feedback to the drone pro are able to confirm the status of their multiple sub systems involved right uh see if we can move next thank you right uh coming to precision landing so uh as I already pointed out uh landing on the docking station is an extremely important part of reliability this has to happen hundred percent of the time day in day out throughout during the lifetime operation of the docking station and the drone and we have come up with a few points here which will help you set up your precision landing set oppression landing on your boxes so the first one that we seriously recommend is aerodynamic design this is primarily to ensure that the docking station does not interfere through airflow manipulations or any other mechanisms to the entire precision landing process

**[18:58]** next we will be looking next we will be looking at sorry sorry for that next we will be looking at height configurable precision landing so when we look at precision landing this can be triggered from multiple uh ranges of heights and for that there are multiple configurations of visual cues that the present landing module requires so it is essential for you guys as docking station manufacturers to kind of take note of this and make sure that your configurations are always in alignment with final use cases and finally we'll come to the last uh point in this checklist which is anti-reflective materials we are trying to convey through this is that during precision landing especially during harsh weather like harsh sunlight when during the afternoon times when the sun is directly on top of your box there are chances that if the tag has not been the tag or all the visual cues are not printed properly or printed on metallic

**[19:59]** surfaces these do get whitewashed in the sunlight and the drone is now just unable to figure out where the box is and where do I need to go and land so it is important to ensure that reliability of christian landing that all visual materials so that they are even clearly visible even when there is direct sunlight on them right so moving on to the fourth of our top 10 to-do's we are looking at connectivity now so since these docking stations are deployed in remote locations which are obviously thousands of miles away as good as thousands of miles away it is essential that they are connected to a to the cloud and to other software systems running inside in cloud through very stable 4g or 5g modems or through external networks so as docking system manufacturers you should definitely provide the option to have an external ethernet connection to your box

**[21:00]** and if this is being deployed in situations where an external ethernet connection or an external wi-fi connection is not the possibility you should have internal 4g or 5g modems inside the box so that it is self-reliant and is able to establish that internet connection that is required uh let's move on avish right so we are almost at the halfway point of our top 10 list and next we have is lifecycle management so again stem discussion that we were having previously of having these boxes remotely deployed that and once these boxes you see reach those remote sites they would be there for like an year year and a half probably even close to 10 years or so so with this uh sort of a time scale there are different updates that would be going to the box there would inadvertently you would be facing issues with referred to hardware maintenance or with respect to kind of software issues that are boiling up inside

**[22:02]** the box so because of this it is very necessary that the boxes which ship out do have process to kind of accept an over-the-air update there should be processes and software's in place which can allow for remote access which can allow for remote logging so that through these systems you could have complete visibility of the box being anywhere in the world also most of this data and the docking station itself should be able to provide information regarding hardware maintenances can be scheduled these are like the key points that are very essential to life cycle management and which which is which which kind of seems irrelevant in the grand scheme of things but when these things go go on for over years they become very important uh next over slide six and seven we will cover uh two important points which are

**[23:04]** cameras and then further going on into lighting so cameras are primarily useful again as we are on the theme of remote access and remote deployments uh we are looking at cameras specifically because any remote operator so we have a box some that is deployed somewhere and as an operator I'm sitting in front of a dashboard now it is essential for the for that operator to have some visual cues of what is happening inside the box is happening in the nearby surrounding of the box so that if there is any immediate action that needs to be taken then that can be accelerated on hence it is essential that you have kind of internal and external cameras around so that key modules of the box such as the enclosure such as the battery mechanisms all of them are continuously monitored as well as external cameras to make sure that there are no unwanted elements close to the box next if we can move on to lighting

**[24:06]** we will see that sense boxes and drones and essentially the entire div system has to operate not only during the day but also during night time it is essential that there is decent lighting around the box in terms of internal lights as well as lights specifically designed for precision landing since precision landing in most cases is going to be a visual cue affair it is necessary that these lights properly eliminate all that precision landing setup so that it can be performed even during night also a very important factor is something like an alert beacon so whenever a docking station does something does an operation like opening an enclosure also it is necessary that you kind of have these alert beacons running so that nearby people if this is in a crowded place are aware that okay now this box is going to do something and we need to stay clear of the box so while you see these do sound trivial at first they

**[25:06]** they play an instrumental part and you see kind of enhancing the safety and enhancing the reliability of this overall system so I wish let's move ahead thanks a lot so next we will be looking specifically at climate control so uh as havisha pointed out to us in his introduction that these docking stations are deployed in a largely varying climatic condition might go from heat to coal to very humid conditions to very dry weather all of this and it is essential that whatever be outside the internal electronics the internal drone the rc all the computational units that are present they are all kept at the nominal temperature range so that they are at their best and peak performance it is essential that we have the humidity controlled inside the box so that there is no

**[26:08]** precipitation or undue precipitation that is happening around so for this essentially what industry standards nowadays follow is the standardized hvac system which is able to kind of uh provide all of keyboard and this is primarily so that all these batteries inside the box that drone inside the electronics inside are all at the best possible environmental conditions now are we moving ahead right so coming to our second to last point in the top 10 list we have weather station and weather station is while it would seem it's something that's outside the box you would have to kind of integrate it with the box but this is primarily important so that we get real-time information of the outside weather which is surrounding the docking station so let us say and we can take some examples like if it was raining outside

**[27:09]** then really be accepting any jobs then the enclosure of the box would not be opening because that could then immediately damage the drone and all the batteries present inside the box so these type of decisions that need to be taken and they need to be taken autonomously hence it is that all docking stations do come with a weather station integrated so that all of this information regarding external weather is available in near real time and all of these smart decisions and these intelligent pieces can work to make sure that all these docking stations and reactions are more reliable and more secure and safe so if we can go to the next one thank you right and coming finally to our last do which is modular design so all the do's that we have seen until now have been aimed towards impacting either reliability or safety or helping with internal drone docking station communication

**[28:09]** and so on and so forth however modular design when we talk about it is most like is mostly aimed towards how quickly can failures be resolved so a portion of this is aligned towards let us say if your box is deployed somewhere and now it faces a mechanical issue which needs a part replacement now if the design and structure of the box in itself is modular a simple part replacement can do the job however if this is a very tight knit box you might a simple part replacement might not be possible and probably an entire box replacement might have to go out which is again extremely expensive extremely time consuming and involves a lot of downtime so modular design essentially would help with quick part replacement also an added business benefit would be that on a base modular platform multiple variants of docking stations could be developed which could then support multiple drones and multiple use cases so

**[29:10]** and I think that is one of the key benefits that would be there to modular design with this I think we have come to the end of our top 10 do's list and I would like to kind of ask avish to help us understand how FlytBase can help a docking system manufacturers and what solutions has like this developed to kind of accelerate their go to market right right so now that you know about all the problems that we faced and how most of the how you have to handle most of the issues to make uh make a document which can go into production the question is how can FlytBase help you with this because you know you guys have known that firebase has been in the industry working with talking stations and drone boxes for a long time now so how do we have to offer to people who really want to you know get into this market so the first thing we have to we have that we can offer to you is prison landing so if a drone was to land only on its gps it would all easily have at least two to three meters of errors right and just to account for this errors which come randomly the docking station would have

**[30:12]** to have a landing pad which is as wide as two to three meters uh two to three meters so just imagine how much more material weight and complexity that is for no reason so what we have for you at FlytBase is christian landing which is something that fractals has been working on for a really long time and we have expert we have uh you know we have basically perforated over the years what's the next thing that firebase can help you with so we have something called as the fnds sdk now fnds sdk what is that fnds means FlytNow documentation sdk and where does it exist it exists on an edge device inside the docking station like inside a raspberry pi so what does the fnds sdk do the first thing it does is that it has a it is a standardized communication protocol between the docking station and the FlytNow dashboard so the rocking channel manufacturer doesn't really have to have to think about where am I going to get my commands from and how I'm going to send my data to FlytNow all of that is sorted out by the fnds sdk the second thing is that it's completely hardware agnostic so it doesn't matter if you're building a docking

**[31:13]** station which can support more than one drone which has you know is it does it swap batteries or does it charge batteries we don't care or you know what kind of drone does it support an m300 or a smaller mavic 2 drones it doesn't matter the fnd sdk is completely hardware agnostic so whatever variant your docking station is it should be able to communicate it should be able to integrate right now easily next thing is reliability like amok mentioned right if you have to do with the workflows where drone and optimization communication is paramount we the fnds sdk essentially takes care of the takes cares of this takes care of this for you so essentially it orchid orchestrates the coordination between the drone and the docking station for example before a tone takes off it always makes sure that the enclosure is open before a drone lands it always makes sure again that the enclosure is open it makes sure that the landing is safe so that the docking so that when the docking station closes it does not damage the drone hence it again you know assures you of the reliability of

**[32:13]** the operations because it does not let us small mistakes and errors leave lead to completely paralyzing the system and uh you know require a human to get in and solve the problem it takes care of it takes care of this reliability for you then the next thing it can provide you is this complex workflow abstraction which I just talked about like before before for example before you know you take off the drone before you start a mission ideally you restart the drone and you restart the rc to clear any errors that the drone and the rc that might have accumulated by just sitting on uh sitting there switched on right again the offensive sdk makes sure that before you start a mission all the errors are clean the drone and the docking station the drone is providing its video feed and when the drone flies it is going to fly okay so this complex layer of uh you know things that you need to do the fn sdk takes care of that again this is something that manufacturers don't have to deal with the last thing it does is that it comes pre-installed with a whole bunch of software like the uh softwares you need for ota for remote logging for remote access all of

**[33:16]** this technology pre comes pre-installed with the fnds sdk what this is what this means is that manufacturers whose expertise usually lies in the hardware and they can just focus on the hardware they can just keep you know innovate in that department try to do try to make really good software uh really good docking stations with really innovative hardwares which are very efficient which are feature packed while we at pride base we take care of the automation for you we take care of the software for you we take it we make sure that if you ever have a firmware update it can be pushed out to that optimization you don't have to worry about the softwares anymore this is the second thing that the FlytBase can provide to documentation manufacturers along with christian landing as the software now the last thing I would like to tell you before we close this session is that uh you have to consider flight based uh because likewise has been for a long time in the industry we really have a wide network with different manufacturers and we really have a lot of years of experience under under our belt what this means is that we have used a whole bunch of different

**[34:17]** kind of drones and we have seen the problems and the issues that come up when you try to build a docking station we have solved these issues and we have helped docking station manufacturers solve their solve those issues themselves we have been in the market for so long that we know exactly what the users want we know uh you know we we we take care of the user experience we take care of the dashboard we take care of the workflows of the failsafes and all of these essential things which make the uh which me which allow for drone automation to actually be doing automation to make it safe so what this means is that if you as an optimization manufacturer ever wanted to get into the industry you probably would not find a partner better than flight based to help guide you and to help you get to the industry as quickly as possible so I guess this was a pretty long pretty long session with a lot of information uh we are really grateful to have have had you with us for as long as we did the information that we shared today uh we have no doubt that with that information you will be able to build really amazing docking station soon and with the clarity of

**[35:17]** the issues which you will face and the and the ones which we can we attract base we can uh help you with we believe you can focus on you know innovation and enter the global market with your own flavor of this product we cannot we cannot wait to see what you guys can come up with once again thank you and we hope to meet you soon meet you again soon as partners over to your swathi awesome that was such a nice note to end it on and wow we we you talked about a lot of things uh uh right to to quickly summarize I suppose uh we talked a little bit about how to design workflows for drone automation how to how to streamline them properly and how to get better components and reliable parts and how important that is how to establish uh establish robust connectivity enable remote operability and I guess you also touched a little bit on designing robust uh fallback mechanisms that will help you uh you come back

**[36:18]** from a failure and and go back to uh yeah flying the drone as soon as you can and of course with FlytNow uh that makes the entire job easier when it comes to precision landing uh communication and coordination with the docking station and a lot more other features so I mean yeah I guess we have oh my god the question the q a section is filling up so I'll get to as many as we can uh but if I can't get all of them you can of course visit uh the FlytNow uh booth as I said uh the slots that I mentioned you can also go to our schedule and check out when we have boots get booth sessions uh happening so I'll quickly uh get through a few questions uh the first so do you have any suggestions on how to streamline the hardware testing process like what kind of tests are necessary you talked a little bit about them but can you give us a quick summary of that uh have you shared any one of you if you'd like to take it right so the like with this

**[37:19]** information that we gave in this uh you know the talk it's very clear that a docking system will come with a lot of systems it's not just one system right so it's very important that each of these systems hardware or software they go through rigorous rigorous testing it's really important they are put through every single situation they everything situation the manufacturer thinks they will be put through when they actually are in the hands of the manufacturer hands of the customer for example murphy's law right you want every single com of every single murphy murphy slot to be proven on your docking station in your testing rig instead of at the customer's hands so my suggestion would be to just go just you know take it through as many tests as possible try to break it yourself and realize what it takes to break your own system and that's how you can keep making it stronger right right okay so um you talked a little bit about precision landing but uh there's a question on the design of the landing pad itself so uh there's a question on like how to design a landing pad that can be compatible with more than one size of a drone one than more more than one uh drone size so you have hobby drones and

**[38:23]** you have big drones like the m300 so yeah right so uh pressure landing uh so obviously you need to make you need to have enough space for the drone to land safely but other than that the tags that is used for the drone to land on those are uniform across any type of drone so it doesn't really matter all you need to do and with every single type of drones we can give uh you know promise an accuracy of around 10 uh of plus minus 15 centimeters at least uh with really considering even the biggest of the biggest drones which means your charge which means your landing pad doesn't really have to be much bigger than the footprint of footprint of the drone it can be just you know the tolerances can be pretty tight okay interesting all right and uh uh I I guess we have time for just a couple more questions um there's a question on how to integrate the weather station data on on your dashboard is that something that FlytNow can help with yes I think ammo can help with the question

**[39:24]** uh yes I wish could you just repeat that for me I'm unable to actually accept technical difficulties with swathi oh right uh are you unable to hear me hello habish can you hear me fine yes yes I'll so the fnds sdk again uh comes in to save uh the show save the day over here the fnds sdk already has predefined routes to send the information of the weather station from the docking station to the flight now front end uh or the dashboard and on the dashboard we already have allowances where you can see the weather uh of whether being reported by the docking station in case you would want to use a third-party service which can can tell you the tell you tell you the weather around the location of the rocking station that is also possible okay right hmm all right um looks like we're yeah I guess we have um I guess you have time for just one more question

**[40:25]** thank you all for your questions really uh I see a lot of them are still coming up but uh yeah we'd have to wrap it up uh but yeah for the final question uh someone asks uh if I'm using a DJI drone can I extend its rc range with the with the docking station is there any way to do that I think uh that is quite unlikely DJI drones come already complete come with some of the best uh range possible for a drone to fly in and a docking station would most uh mostly just preserve that range it would not actually help to extend it in any significant way okay okay all right great so that brings us the end of the session uh great thank you all so much for joining us thank you havisha namok for uh sharing all these never seen before insights uh be sure to check them out uh at the booth and of course look go go to go to the reception and check out other sched other events that are going to happen soon and I hope to see you all uh there thank you all uh unless you

**[41:31]** guys have any uh closing thoughts I'd like to end this session uh thank you to our great audience for being here throughout the session and like I said previously we hope to see you again as partner someday yes sure uh thanks a lot for attending guys