# Connectivity Considerations For Scaling Autonomous Drone Operations - Event: NestGen ’24 - Published: April 30, 2024 - Length: 26:06 - Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/F8Vo-EQxOWk/ > 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 In this session you'll learn how Elsight's Halo connectivity solution enables scalable and secure autonomous drone operations beyond the visual line of sight. Halo provides reliable multi-link cellular connectivity with satellite and RF integration to ensure uninterrupted command, control, video, and data transmission for commercial and industrial drone fleets. Key features like redundancy, encryption, low latency, and high bandwidth are highlighted. To know more, visit: ===== Subscribe to FlytBase YouTube - Follow Us On - LinkedIn - Facebook - Twitter - Instagram - ## Transcript **[0:21]** hello guys hello everyone and welcome to another staggering session of NES gen 24 can everybody hear me all right please pleas do let us know in the chat where all of you are guys are joining us from we would love to know from what parts of the world we are reaching out to okay so I'm AR a product designer at flight Bas and I'm delighted to welcome you to this session how are you finding the session so far please let us know in the chat it will help us Cur the sessions better in the upcoming Edition a wonderful audience yes okay so we not letting our audience wait anymore so coming to the session's topic we will be talking about connectivity considerations for scaling autonomous drone operations with the industry growing and breathing autonomy the need for stateof art connectivity technology arises and here is where lside comes in to go into greater detail we have a special guest who will be sharing their thoughts about the same she leads the marketing department at Elite and has been in the B2B **[1:25]** marketing domain for more than 20 years in various cyber and telecommunication Hightech companies she holds an mCP and ba from the University of Pennsylvania let's give a hearty welcome to Susan Becker hi Susan if you could just turn on your camera right now the audience would like to see you yes thank you so much hi everyone so before I hand it over to Susan please that there's some housekeeping rules to keep in mind uh do uh ensure to type your Q&A sessions uh questions in the sessions tab under the uh on the right side you'll see a sessions tab under which you have a Q&A sections do write your questions during uh all the questions will be answered by Susan at the end of this uh session the session is getting recorded and will be published soon we also have an inside booth in the Expo section please make sure you visit it during the networking at Booth visiting slots with that over to you Susan thank **[2:28]** you okay well first of all thank you for having us today um I'm relatively new to Elight uh so bear with me um but it's been a a great ride as it were uh joining the company let me just mention a few things about Elite uh founded in 2009 but originally the company focused on uh video compression uh solutions for drones and in 202 20 we pivoted with the launch of our halo uh platform for connectivity our headquarters is in Israel and our connectivity technology for BB loss is specifically for uncrewed aerial and ground systems we have around a 100 customers uh comprised of drone manufacturers and operators and traffic management players and we have more than 200,000 flying hours uh class Lo in so it's a it's a **[3:32]** tried and true solution and let's go on to uh what it means to scale uh on the in the context of connectivity uh first of all I don't think you know this is going to surprise anybody to know that there are so many BV loss advantages in so many Industries across our world uh from utilities oil and gas surveillance medical deliveries Logistics deliveries agriculture mining construction all kinds of monitoring and then obviously in our defense and Public Safety First Responders uh Industries these are all um industries that uh elide plays in um and I'll go more though into how the BB loss connectivity is critical when it comes to scalability of the entire drone ecosystem um also the cost efficiencies when uh using the the right kind of connectivity um **[4:38]** and probably obvious to everybody are the safety issues as a major driver in uh in the growth of the ecosystem so just for A Brief Review uh there's you know the visual line of sight uh oneon-one drone then there's the extended line of sight when you may be able to operate a few drones but only in a limited fashion mostly using the assistance of observers and of course the BB loss the beyond the visual line of sight um and what's key here is not just the extended reach which is uh obvious but also being able for one operator to fly a fleet of drones and there you know from there we understand better the whole scalability of the Drone ecosystem but there are challenges um as I mentioned safety being number one um but **[5:38]** fortunately the regulations are coming through in regard to aspects like having a remote ID uh that is going to be finalized at least in the US um in March um for both Network and broadcast remote ID uh airspace management techniques um very important to for our utmost safety the other aspect you the challenge we have is the all the components related to the autonomous travel the flight path management systems and the like and of course the connectivity options in order to uh succeed in a Beyond visual line of sight flight pass so when we talk about BB loss and the network uh operations uh systems what do you need uh scalability so again we're talking about using having systems **[6:40]** that can do one uh one operator per many drones um and also key for scalability is the elimination of the human factor um that is from a cost perspective and also just a growth perspective um and of course from the perspective of uh drone usage has to be uh cost efficient it's got to be you know the business cases needed to be considered in addition to the technical uh use case um without that it's it's never going to literally take off and so scalability has different aspects to it both from the technical and the business uh perspective High availability um if you're not going to be able to keep the drones in the air for 99.9 if not more percent of the time then we have nothing to talk about because it just can't work that way there are too many um potentially bad consequences and **[7:45]** Security in terms of you know you're talking about transmission of data uh for so many things between the the flight path of the of the Drone and also if you're doing uh if you're flying for the visual aspect for the for the video aspect then you need the the Cy the cyber security for that video and you also need the data security for the data transmitted to the CNC to the control and command because that could obviously sabotage the whole flight pass so there are many aspects here um when it comes to the success of BB be you loss so what are the Alternatives what are the systems being used today and if you feel like it on the side you see the uh the poll uh the small poll we put out about getting a survey of what is your current uh connectivity system so you have the point-to-point **[8:46]** RF mostly in the unlicensed of frequencies but they're limited it requires line of sight and it also limits the applications uh to many of them are relying online of site you uh very much um potential for jamming from other systems uh purposely or not purposely so it's not a very reliable system um and it could be very expensive because you need a lot of equipment and it takes a high power consumption uh the other thing is if the data that you're collecting on these flights are important to you um you can't leverage a cloud management solution and so that's Limited in terms of your uh data collection or your use of cloud uh for monitoring and configuration then there's satellite uh Communications but that uh they come a lot **[9:47]** with many liabilities as well um they are extremely expensive from slightly expensive to massively expensive um which obvously can bring down any kind of drone business immediately um you have medium to high latency which you know means your connection isn't so stable and you it offers very low bandwidth so if you want to be transmitting uh uh big files of Da of data like video it's probably not your best form of communication but sometimes it's the only uh form available uh very often it's what you must use like when you're going over big bodies of water then you have our the public cellular infrastructure today mostly LTE and 5G some areas might be uh uh earlier versions um and they are a lot more omnipresent than you think and a lot more robust **[10:53]** than you think um but using one Cellular Connection is not enough uh on the other hand it does have many advantages um it supports the one to many topology um it doesn't rely on line of sight with GCS it's not limited in range it doesn't require expensive transmitters and receivers you do have pretty widespread Network infrastructure very low comes with very low latency and high bandwidth it enables SAS BAS control platforms like some Cloud uh data um Data Systems and it's comes as as a very low swap uh so it's light and uh easy to um to deploy however when we're looking uh at these systems as a comparison you'll see **[11:55]** that um many of them have too many disadvantages to be a very good solution so like I mentioned before about the RF easily jammed with no redundancy similar with satellite links very expensive no redundancy One Singular cellular link can be jammed and no redundancy uh some failover solutions using RF and cellular may have some redundancy but still with some communication drops um when it comes to the direct RF link you still require a line of sight between the unmanned vehicle and the operator so it's a not a real option for BB loss the satellite links require open Skies bulky and and it's heavy with a high latency and low bandwidth a singular cellular link has reception holes in the high Al altitude **[12:56]** and behind objects and if you're using a RF with cellular you still have those reception holes between objects low bandwidth no link and nor uh good latency optimization so what we want to present to you is the the concept of multi-link cellular with the options of connecting also to satellite and RF um and it's a full proven uh field proven system that we've been using for the last few years your full redundancy high bandwidth low latency cyber secured and operational safety we do this by aggregating all the available IP links to a secure bonded pipeline for both and unman systems both ground and aerial to ensure operational continu uh continuity and this is what our halo looks like um it's as big as the uh palm **[13:59]** of my hand in the Halo card version uh it's less than 100 grams and you could see one option on the left which is all four LTE modems and the one on the right is LTE and uh 5G so we're using this multi-link bonding that provides robust connectivity for drones uh and is gives you continuous transmission of high quality of service Telemetry and video and also the uh key here is that it can be configure to be always deciding on which of your data has prioritization over the other is it the CNC Telemetry or is it the video or any other data so this is um the other aspect that is important for you to do during these uh BB loss flights uh your adding Cellular Communications that's **[15:02]** aggregated and then you can if you want join uh plugin uh to integrate with satellite and RF if you if you would like um I mentioned about the the size it also comes in the a box Halo edition uh we also have embedded the remote ID for both Network and broadcast it is Data encrypted it's supports mlink and it maintains your quality of service uh in aial cellular a little bit more about the technical requirements uh it has high bandwidth by doing multi-link aggregation into a a bonded pipeline you expand the available bandwidth by fusing all the IP links together into one network tunnel you have re reliability and redundancy you are safeguarded against system failure by having multiple Network **[16:06]** Pathways to rely on you have fully encrypted security both on the up Uplink and the down link you have ultr low latency reducing your latency to a minimum by utilizing all the available Network infrastructure and you have hot failover protection our binding algorithm automatically detects transmission channels that have failed and seam seamlessly translate transmits the data over a different channel so it would be going from LTE to satellite and back uh for every uh every millisecond this is just a brief look of what our highlevel common architecture is that on the Drone platform you have the Halo inside um it could be connected to a camera if you want to be U transmitting video um you can be connected to a SAT link on a uh USB port on the side or **[17:10]** RF and it's being uh aggregated at first and then into one secure Pipeline and then being separated uh as it gets to the towers if there's an option to use our cloud service for your monitoring and your configuration of the system um but it's not a must it can also be uh used as an on-prem uh solution and that is all for right now and thank you very much for inviting me for today and I would like to know if you have any questions or you're welcome to write uh either me or at info elite.com uh or look at our website yes thank you Susan that was a very informative session so audience do please let us know in the chat how was this session for you if you have any questions please do ask **[18:16]** Susan yeah the you can put your questions in the Q&A tab so yes I think one of the questions we have Susan is uh what are the cons of of uh sat uh satellite Communications for when it comes to us communication um I can't say it's only for us but I can say that it's um extremely expensive we're talking um well I think they told me how much exactly um it's it's much more I mean it's costing thousands of dollars a month uh for sure obviously depending on your usage but it's it's mostly a price issue and and that it's not giving you the latency and it's not giving the bandwidth that uh will probably work for you right yes makes sense okay so one one of the questions we have are what are the chances of jamming and hacking this Halo module during **[19:20]** operation so the Halo isn't uh going to be jammed or hacked um it's field proven it's also field proven in defense um operations so we've been on the front line as it were literally and figuratively um so that's not an issue between the the cyber security and also the uh the use I mean think of it in terms of hacking and jamming you'd have to take down the Cellular Communications let me just give you one example um we started with um a drone operator in Australia uh sphere drones and their first pilot with us was during the well-known uh outage of uh I think it's their um second biggest uh cellular provider in the country Opus that lost power for about a day and a half and about 10 million people were out of Cellular Communications and our drones kept their drones on our system **[20:25]** kept flying because of the of our algorithm the way it's working it's this multi-link bonded pipeline so the minute one's going down another one is staying up and typically if you even think in a military operation would the enemy even want to take down your um The Cellular Communications because then they would lose it also so um and then of course you could also rely if the cellular goes down you have either satcom or RF so it's very very difficult diffult or it's a very very unlikely scenario that it would go down BB loss is beyond visual line of site right yes I think yes that was wonderful to hear also one of the questions we have is how does the Halo module interface with the flight computer on the Drone and what hardware and software Protocols are supported okay I'm going to take that question and I'm going to get back to you um **[21:30]** cuz it's a very long technical one and I want to get it absolutely right so I'll take that and and get back to I could even send it to the organizer so everybody sees it right that works too okay another question we have is how much does the Halo module weigh and can you provide insights on the cost of the Halo so the Halo card weighs uh 93 grams and the the price is under $3,000 a unit okay yes I hope that answers your question abishek uh also I think another yes it's also for is the Halo available for midlevel business users and is it available uh by way of leasing um yes and [Laughter] [Music] yes okay yeah that aners we I mean a lot of our customers are you know just starting out because of the **[22:33]** market so many of them could be a group of you know from two to 10 people or that that's how they start um so they may be you know a medium customer now but soon things will I keep saying will take off but it's just a kind of compelling just easy expression right yes yes that definitely makes sense uh also there's another question of what do you think is the best commercial solution economical solution for delivery flight boss over water Island to Island since we are living in archipelago does Halo suitable work for that kind of beos so um I it would be worth speaking to our experts but from my understanding um that over the water that is when you might be ch in over to the the satellite communication where our our cell cellular um Communications usually goes **[23:40]** somewhat uh like I think it's 400 um uh off um what do you got miles or kilometers offshore um but after that you um you're going to have to use the cellular U options I'm sorry not the cellular satellite options right right so building on that there's another question if the Halo is waterproof good question um I don't [Laughter] know my guess is look it's inside the Drone so the question is I you know is the Drone waterproof yeah makes sense okay so one of the last questions we have is are there any scal scalability issues to use Halo on multiple drones I want yes I mean that's the big Advantage when I was talking about the scalability of the entire ecosystem that you need um a solution that works from one operator to a fleet and that **[24:42]** that is uh that includes our hello um so yes and that that's the key and and also in scalability in terms of people uh eliminating the the human factor um you configure it and you know it's it's it's up um and obviously you don't need observers right yes okay so I think we're right on time uh everybody who else has questions can reach out to Karen as she mentioned on the websites or the email IDs or I think some of you have already sent requests to uh Susan on LinkedIn so I think you're going to get a lot of questions on LinkedIn as well uh right so coming uh towards closing this session um right if you like the session uh it would be great if you guys could share it on LinkedIn or you could drop a post somewhere and of course the top three posts will receive some special nen hampers and also ending this presentation with uh thanking our title sponsors so thank you all for joining **[25:44]** us today hope you all had a great time and I'd also like to thank our title sponsor DJI Enterprise and our goal sponsor sunflower Labs so hope you guys had a great time here let us know how you found the session in the comments and coming up in the next few minutes are just as amazingly informative sessions please go to the sessions Tab and attend the session of your choice see you in the next session