# LTE: A Critical Component for Enabling BVLOS Drone Operations

- Event: NestGen ’23
- Published: March 28, 2023
- Length: 35:19
- Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/A4Ho_FtgDgw/

> 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

Extending the operating range of your favorite DJI drone would be critical for long-range BVLOS ops. Join the session to learn how LTE module helps.

## Transcript

**[0:08]** thank you so hello everyone welcome to Next Gen 23 the world's first and largest drone autonomy Summit I hope that you're having a great time uh so far at National 23 and you know looking forward to the session that we have here so before we begin it would be great if you can just let me know where are you joining from what do you do what excited you the most about this session just so get uh just so we can get an idea um you know on our audience so in this session we will explore the crucial role uh that long-term Evolution or LTE technology plays in enabling Beyond visual line of sight drone operations the need for BVLOS drone operations is increasing as we speak with Industries such as

**[1:08]** agriculture infrastructure inspection Emergency Services relying heavily on drones to perform critical tasks however the success of the vvnos operations is largely dependent on reliable and efficient communication systems and this is where LTE technology comes into play providing a fast secure and ubiquitous Network that is ideal for bvls drone operations so with that uh I'll make a quick introduction uh to the speaker so paladins founder Devi srivastava spend most most of his childhood in a town 25 minutes north of Columbus Ohio in 2016 just as he was ready to attend Berkeley for engineering a close friend's house got fire and burned down this event had a massive impact on Devi and the community as a whole after talking to the local fire chief he learned two important facts a fire doubles

**[2:10]** in size every 30 seconds and First Responders never have enough time when they arrive on the scene this is because when someone calls 9-1-1 they're usually panicked or not trained to assess a situation and he knew there had to be a better way after another fire burned down a Campus Church during his first year at Berkeley did he set out to found Paladin with a single mission sent autonomous drones to 911 calls to give First Responders a live overhead view of an emergency before they arrived helping to increase situational awareness decrease response time and save lives the way I must say that's truly an inspiring story and it sets a lot of context for our audience as well uh I would like to welcome you uh to National and to this session particularly and I'm looking forward to all the insights that you have to you know share with us

**[3:12]** so before before we begin I just have a couple of housekeeping rules that I'd like to share with the audience so there's a specific q a tab for the questions you may use that and once we are done with this session we will make sure that we take up those questions one by one this session is also getting recorded and will be published soon on all our social media channels and once the session ends we do have a booth in the Expo section so if you want to connect with Divi and ask a couple of more questions or have some specific requirements you can do that as well if you like this session please drop a LinkedIn post um you can tag FlytBase and use the hashtag nesgen23 and the hashtag opendiib movement top three posts will receive special message and hampers and last but not the least we'd like to thank our title sponsor DJI Enterprise and a platinum sponsor while it is Aerospace uh with that baby I hand it over to you

**[4:16]** right Neil thank you so much for the gracious introduction uh audit numbers great meeting you now nice seeing some familiar faces and some new ones as well during this presentation I uh like to just go over more about how Paladin was started some of the current work we are doing and hopefully ask any questions throughout the session so Neil um I will take it away I believe I can share my screen and uh honest members please let me know if at any point um if something is not exactly working so with that I'll try sharing my screen here we go can everyone see my screen yesterday we can see your screen great uh hey everyone as Neil said my name is Divi and I'm the CEO and founder of Paladin just a little bit of background on me um and how I came to be where I am today I was born in India and I moved to the United States when I was very young I

**[5:19]** spent most of my uh childhood in the state of Ohio a great place to grow up if anybody ever wants to visit it's nice quiet and very very peaceful in 2016 I was heading off to college um to study engineering at Berkeley was very very excited to be going out of my bubble and uh hopefully learn from from the best and that summer um one of my friends houses uh burnt down I was uh in a very tight-knit uh community and in those communities one something that tragic happens it affects everyone very deeply and through that I started to just learn a little bit more about emergency response I don't have or I don't have any family in First Response um don't have any sort of background there um and I just wanted to know what happens during emergencies and I started talking to my local fire chief his name was Chief Noble and he told me two things that have

**[6:21]** stuck with me since then and if there are other First Responders in the audience I'd love to know if this is resonating with you and if not I would love to know what your stories happen well the two things he told me um was that number one a fire can double in size every 30 seconds this came as a pretty big shock to me um it's difficult to put that into perspective but what that can mean is that a single fire that's starting from you know maybe a corner in some sort of house depending on the conditions can be covering the entire room in in just a couple of minutes and uh he stressed to me the urgency of time how each second in that situation counts and he also told me that First Responders just in general don't have um situational awareness when they arrive on scene and he also explained this to me again uh die did not come from that background I had a lot to learn and he told me that usually at least uh within the United States we have our

**[7:26]** 911 system and 911 system allows anyone to call for an emergency usually when people are calling those people are not trained uh First Responders they're not trained to know how to size up an emergency how to effectively communicate information it's no one's fault it's just the way it is and unfortunately what this results in for the First Responders when they arrive on scene or even as they are arriving is not knowing what they might be getting into and given that I have been growing up with technology I can access information immediately if I need to this didn't really sit well with me um I figured there had to be something that can be done to help when I went off to college unfortunately saw more fires one of our college campus churches burnt down um and there was a tragic Oakland warehouse fire during the same time around the same year that unfortunately claimed more lives and during that entire time I was just talking to more First Responders the same

**[8:30]** problem uh was communicated to me which was a lack of situational awareness and uh one uh one evening I was talking with the fire captain and he was explaining to me that at least on his calls um he had a fire station that was on top of a hill and on top of that Hill a lot of the responses that he would go to would be maybe overturned Vehicles they would be maybe down the hill somewhere or any sort of dangerous conditions and he was just saying that you know maybe if there was a way to tell before they arrived on scene exactly where the car was um maybe that could help and I kind of just started working on that idea and I thought well what if we could do that for every single emergency what if every single time there is an emergency somebody calls 9-1-1 what if we could get a drone overhead the Drone doesn't need to worry about uh destination it does not need to worry about sorry trout traffic or anything like that it should be able to just

**[9:32]** travel in a straight line if it can get there the Drone probably has a camera and maybe we can send that information to the First Responders who are on scene my hypothesis was maybe this could help save lives maybe this could help save time at the very least hopefully provide more information so that people are safer and in 2018 I dropped out to turn this into a full-time company and today Paladin deploys autonomous drones to emergencies our drones and our entire Suite of software and Hardware that we create allows First Responders to fly to an emergency with the click of one button and just directly go from there um I think there might be some questions on chat Neil let me know if something is coming up but that is how he got started um and since then what that means today is today we've developed a lot of different solutions uh when I first started out in 2018 and started the company the biggest

**[10:34]** shortcoming I saw to make this Vision a reality um there were many that's the first one I realized was the current way drones communicate and the way I'm sorry to continue in between uh is it possible for you to uh you know start the slideshow just so that everyone can see it better can you uh sure I'm not sure if it will translate over welcome to voice over voice over speaks description uh the slideshow so yeah I can see yeah yes yes perfect great audience is that a little much is that much better yes uh great so when I first started out in 2018 um drones were being flown with a remote controller and in order to send a drone to anywhere uh any sort of far away uh you know assuming there were regulations to allow that um the Drone would need to maintain some sort of connectivity now

**[11:34]** I again grew up in a pretty small town in Ohio um where I would want to make a solution that would work in every single City and in order for that to happen one of the first things I realized was that there had to be some way to communicate with the Drone even if the remote controllers um RF based frequency signal did not work and what I mean by that is if any of our audience members have tried flying a drone uh a little bit far and maybe you know you're not at a high place you're just in in a parking lot maybe doing some sort of an inspection um chances are if you go behind a building or if you go severely behind a building or anywhere else you will likely lose connection um especially if you are trying to send a drone very very far away uh radio signals unless you have a very very powerful antenna just do not work well in those situations and I wanted to create a system that would work in every single City and most cities today have a very robust cellular infrastructure and I started working

**[12:37]** on a solution and the solution was well let's just start controlling drones over LTE so we started with a couple of products the first one we officially released was Nighthawk this was a drone that we created um using entirely LTE and the purpose of the Drone was to be able to respond to emergencies immediately with the click of one button um releases in 2021 and started deploying it to several cities and proved that it works prove that LTE is able to send the Drone several miles away and through Nighthawk and through all the work that I've been doing we have also been able to get uh waivers to be able to send these Trails as far away as needed and that really helped us get started and in my head real um confirmed that LTE is the way to at least deploy drones wherever is the deploy drones especially Beyond visual line of sight and very recently uh just a couple of months ago we released our next product which is the Paladin EXT because a

**[13:38]** lot of our departments uh First Responders were all they most first responder communities do not have big budgets it's difficult to buy drones and getting any sort of buy-in from departments is difficult it's thankfully getting better every single day but we wanted to make a system that would work for everyone so the Paladin EXT was created as a box that would have all of the LTE the autonomy needed for this entire system to work and the Paladin EXT is the current product that we are gosh shipping out to several States across the country and this has our LTE system it has our autonomy system and it can bolt on to DJI drones in order to send them as far as needed Al Hong said with our FAA waivers to send to emergencies and LTE is deployed today and it's working very well um so well I'll quickly try to share a video of the EXT Neil

**[14:40]** I'm not sure if we can still see my screen uh you can feel screen yes it's it's visible great so let me try to share my video over here just play a quick video um let me know if we can or cannot hear us great introducing Paladin EXT breaking through the barriers of a radio-based uavs and their limited range with an easy installation of the EXT module fly your DJI drone Beyond visual line of sight EXT enables you to operate first responder programs without the need for a remote pilot in command on a rooftop fly anywhere in the country with an LTE connection via a sexually located Command Center receive a call for service and have a live overhead hand within minutes gather valuable situational Awareness on the ground and broadcast the live feed to

**[15:41]** your team across multiple devices before First Responders arrive on the scene it is a game changer dfr is the future you know the Drone First Response it lets you respond to calls where seconds count we're also excited to extend the autonomous controls and unlimited range of the EXT to other Industries and unlock new possibilities and 3D mapping inspections and acquisition Paladin EXT Limitless range unlimited possibilities that was a great video baby it literally gave me goosebumps me too I I didn't get goosebumps when I saw myself appear on the screen I was like ah [Laughter] um but that's uh that's what we've created and that's what we are working with um I'll continue back to the presentation and uh Neil um happy to answer questions now where we can keep them at the end time for the end

**[16:43]** we have a we have some dedicated time to address all the questions so you can you know continue with your presentation and then we can take up the questions later sure so just more on the EXT um it's made for specifically for DJI products and reason for that being is most of our first responder community and most of the Enterprise Community as a whole today are using the DJI drugs um it allows you to use all the capabilities of your existing platforms with all the payloads the gimbals everything you are currently used to and our EXT Port just attaches on top and directly connects with all of our infrastructure so the infrastructure that I want to quickly talk about is watchtower so Watchtower is our online platform in order to command control um keep track of all of your equipment data everything all in one website this works on any single device that has an internet connection we've tested it with Chromecast

**[17:48]** we've tested it with all sorts of different controllers but essentially what with this platform connected to EXT once you turn on your drone and the EXT is already installed um a live video feed as well as all of the autonomy controls will log on to Watchtower as the Drone is flying you will be able to especially for First Responders be able to control every single aspect of the Drone the camera the angle the speed you can plug in a Gamepad controller if you want to to fly or you can use your keyboard and mouse if you are more used to a traditional gaming setup to fly the system it also handles all of data management and logging this has especially become important for our first responder users as they are tracking exactly where these drones are going to what sort of emergencies they are responding to and how we are able to help increase or increase efficiency and decrease response time and it allows you to fly stream manage data and again in order to control this drone you

**[18:50]** can be anywhere in the world technology wise and be able to control a drug all you have to do is log in and fly it immediately and very very easily I well the biggest advice I got from our firefighting clients and friends was that um everything should be very very simple if it's over complicated or difficult to use then it will become very very difficult for others to use in high stress information areas and which is why we use a very simple start stop in RTA system all you have to do is click on a map or type in an address click Start and the drum all the time is to go through that location you can click stop at any point which will cause the Drone to hover and once the mission is over click rth and return home if you need more control you can always use keyboard controls and others to keep more precise control to drone as well as automatically generate reports manage your entire fleet and handle your data securely as part of this especially when working with First Responders um I learned that it's

**[19:54]** very difficult to get any sort of drone program started and again my goal is to have every single Department who wants to do dfr using drugs so we as part of our process also help drones also help entire departments cities set up their FAA guidelines and work through them through the entire process we'll get on a call we'll handle all the paperwork we'll make sure to be talking uh and we'll make sure to be talking with your Pilots to train them on what needs to happen walk you through what the FAA is expecting be there for all the different calls that are needed with the FAA and continue making this process better and thankfully we are supported with our first responder Community to always be giving us feedback to make the system better and better every single day so I was just a very quick presentation um Neil happy to answer questions and wanted to keep the rest of this just very open-ended to see what else I can yes sure definitely thanks for you know sharing the sharing more details on your product it's it's

**[20:59]** really impressive and you know thanks for coming here and sharing your expertise as well and you know giving us all the knowledge uh and telling us where the industry is headed when it comes to drones as First Responders we also have uh had scheduled a couple of polls so we can just take some time and you know see what kind of responses we've got on those polls so I think there was one question where do you go online to learn more about uh all right I'll skip this one for now how difficult has it been for your organization to obtain bbls uh waivers so do you have do you want to share something on that uh from my end or yes yeah sure um so bvl's waivers uh back when they were uh back when everything was being started I um uh were very difficult in fact the um at least in the US there was a IPP program um that awarded us or that worked with specific cities to start help you know to

**[22:02]** help start the entire process um and that I think got the entire ball rolling um and there were some very clear leaders uh like like Chula Vista Police Department who have been leading the way on those operations and thankfully we're seeing today that um more and more departments are getting vvlos waivers just from us you know we're in double digits now in terms of bbls flavors being approved with our cities currently using them and I expect that number to continue increasing now it is still not a fully repeatable process um we have been very fortunate at least within the United States there are different airspace classes um anywhere from GE all the way to the you know more more complicated ones um we've been fortunate where the Departments we are working with and by talking with the FAA we're able to fly BVLOS in restricted airspaces such as class Bravo airspace we have several waivers in these airspaces and I think it's largely due to the um way we are setting up our Command and control center as well as working with our First Responders to make sure that all the requirements are being met

**[23:06]** um I'm looking forward to I hopefully in in the in the near future where we'll be able to have an even more streamlined process um so it has only gotten better and easier that being said many departments are still running into just questions or issues and this just could be because we are still so early into this um that everyone is still figuring it out but there's definitely a path forward and we're very excited to have been kind of on that edge all right that's that's great to know David uh so I think we have an audience from all across the globe so there's one question if your products are available in the UK and are CE compliant the products are available in the UK and CE compliance uh the products if you are out of the Ursh please send us an email I'd love to chat with you we are um we are looking at International customers as well um this EXT module was created for First Responders um and in the process we just started getting emails from kind of all over saying

**[24:08]** hey we actually would like to use LTE um to try to augment our operations as well so please reach out to to me directly at team at Paladin drones.com and would love to see what we can get done in the UK and especially if it's First Response um very interested to know what your daily operations are like all right we also have a couple of questions on the grade of Lte so you know what grade of Lte is needed to fly the Drone reliably uh for example it's class one class four and what are the data rates if you can shed some more light on that yeah our system um LT is different internationally there there are many different ways to classify what I like to use just as a common ground is a bandwidth um and in order to have uh minimal latency and minimal latency I'm saying you know less than half a second if if not much faster um usually uh we we like to see upload speeds of at least 600 kbps uh through that

**[25:09]** we're able to get about a 720p video fairly consistently up um and if that upload speed increases to maybe one megabyte or two megabytes then we can consistently stream 1080 and and then on um 4K streaming does require significantly more in order to have consistent and low latency video feed but as long as we're able to have like at a bare minimum 600 you'll be able to get video in order to have this complete Command and control meaning maybe the video is not there but you are able to control the Drone um and tell it where it needs to maneuver um our system is able to work with just just about 10 10 to 20 kbps um upload speeds and download speeds are dependent on the user so that's just the better download speed you have on your end computer um the the better the better it's going to be but it's limiting factors usually upload speed on LTE uh generally I recommend if we are able to get one Mbps up that's more than enough to have a very consistent stream

**[26:12]** all right um so I think we have one more question so uh I think there was a flight uh small Hardware piece of Hardware that goes on top of the Drone right so are there any significant uh is there any significant loss in flight time that you have seen great question yeah the current EXT module and if you saw from the video the first one we released was very very big uh we we've since uh and that was several months ago will we keep making smaller modules the latest one is significantly smaller um and it's decreasing flight time by about 15 so there is a little bit of a hit on flight time uh in our first responder scenarios this hasn't seemed to make much of much or any of a difference because most of our on scene time is 20 uh 20 to 25 minutes anyways which is right right within the range of safe operations all right that's good to know and I think there's one more question so do you have a skirt around uh for the anti-DJI fair that is being propagated by the government so

**[27:14]** I think uh um you know uh the most of the hardware that you're using is the DJs or do you have do you want to share something on this like your perspective uh could you repeat that one more time Neil so again uh in the US there's an anti-DJI Pro propaganda right so if you uh want to share some more light on that so what's your take on that uh are users tell us essentially which drones that they would like to be using um we work with several different drone platforms we have Nighthawk that we have created which is uh you know our drone and users who want to use that come to us and say that's what we want to use and our First Responders who are using DJI um come to us and say hey we would like a product that is working with them and our goal as a company is to make sure we are following the needs of our customers so if there are other drone platforms that customers want to use and we are able to find a way to work with them then that's exactly what we'll do all right it's it's good to know that your product is

**[28:14]** modular and customizable so I think that's that's the right way to move forward uh I think there's one more question so when it comes to first responder situations do you have any third-party Integrations that uh let's say uh send you and you know details about an incidence so let's say if there's a fire at a specific location do you is it possible for you to get that information and launch the Drone directly to that specific location our system is modular enough to do that yes we customize it City by City not every single City wants to have a fully automated response meaning the emergency the minute something happens the Drone immediately takes off um we always recommend having a well we always recommend having a pilot not only in the loop but the pilot is responsible for clicking um the actual takeoff of of the system operationally this can mean that we can have for example a pop-up that says hey there is an emergency that is going on however it is on the decision of the pilot in charge to deploy that or not deploy that as

**[29:19]** regulations change as needs change we're always looking to see what our departments want and we go from there all right all right okay uh this one I think a lot of questions around LTE its range and you know uh questions related to its bandwidth so uh there's one uh person from the audience who says LT has the advantage in the range department but lacks in the bandwidth and latency part of it so do you have any work around around those issues we haven't seen much issues with latency again we are live with several users all across the United States and the biggest latency we have ever seen is half a second and it is going to be more latency than if you're used to traditional RF controls um however our you know we're clearing emergencies every single day with the system so the areas where this will not work as well and we are when we go to a department we always see what the LTE coverage is like um you know if it's a very super rural

**[30:24]** area where there is not a lot of LTE coverage I would not recommend an LTE solution and so therefore it just depends City to City however our goal is to be working with the majority of departments across the country and across the world where LTE you know sitting on infrastructure is is very very good all across so we're not seeing any issues so far um or at least very very minimal issues if there is for any reason a blackout or we come into a bad spot because LTE coverage is not always consistent then our system knows to automatically return home it is constantly doing several levels of safety checks to check the speed the system the signal integrity and act accordingly if we lose signal then the Drone is uh depending on what the department policies are and what we agree on for the waivers that we get usually is to return home and the Drone is always trying to reconnect okay thanks Devi for sharing those insights uh there's one last question and this is

**[31:26]** from my end so I have saved this um you know for me so again uh you know this is something that we are asking all our partners could you please share some insights and your thoughts on the open div approach so where basically each company contributes to a different layer of the Drone autonomy stacked so uh in paladins context you have a piece of Hardware that goes on to the Drone the Drone itself might or might not be manufactured by a different you know manufacturer so do you think like what are your thoughts on this approach what are its benefits and how can it help the grow uh help the industry grow so I I think it's uh important to work with whatever your customer wants I think that's what matters at the end of the day um well that fits into our approaches we work with our we have DJI drone supports we have Nighthawks which is our own Trump support and we will uh you know we have

**[32:28]** support for PX4 and other drones as well we also partner with other companies who work on who are very very great at other parts in the ecosystem for example uh shout out to Sky Browns they do 3D mapping for departments and yeah you know we we are not well we know nothing about 3D mapping but we work with them so that's uh when departments need a 3D map created very quickly very efficiently and effectively um they're able to work with them and we want to make sure that as we keep growing have that interconnectivity because at the end of the day the user especially First Responders benefit the most from having um a interconnected system yes rightly said that totally makes sense and you know uh again like when you have a customer requirement you need to cater to it and just combine all the synergies that you can and come out of the product that's Innovative and at the end of the day is saving lives and helping a lot of people so uh you know I it

**[33:33]** totally makes sense uh thanks again for joining the session and sharing your insights um I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank our audience so thank you all for joining next gen today and hope you're having a great time as well do let us know how you form the session in the comments and we also have a couple of other sessions and a few networking sessions with uh at our phone uh at our booths and at our Expo so I believe really you will be at your booth right so uh the audience if you have some requirements and you want to discuss uh some things with maybe in more detail you can just go to the Expo Tab and connect with them other booth I'm sure did we will be happy to take any questions or requirements that you might have yeah happy to answer any questions that I can um and thank you Neil for moderating and thank you next channel for putting this together um excited to keep seeing the entire industry grow and more drones for everyone yes that's true uh and on that note do

**[34:39]** you have any closing thoughts that you'd like to share with everyone um thank you guys for coming I'm very very excited to see the growth of the industry on automation on dfr inspections all over um please reach out to me if you have any questions and uh thank you all again yes thanks baby for taking the time so I'm not sure if people know but Divi is not well today but he's taken up the time and he's really made an effort to be here so thanks baby you know your spirit is worth commanding of course happy to be here thank you everyone thanks baby it was great talking to you and speak to you soon bye