# Transforming Airspace Awareness with Digital Visual Observers - Event: NestGen ’24 - Published: March 28, 2024 - Length: 33:40 - Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/IEL24MdkwWo/ > 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 Join us for an enlightening session on "Enhancing Airspace Awareness with Autonomous Drones" brought to you by FlytBase. Delve into the crucial elements of autonomous drone operations with our expert speakers as they discuss the pivotal role of situational awareness and digital visual observers. From navigating regulatory compliance to addressing scalability and cost challenges, this session offers actionable insights to optimize drone operations for efficiency and safety. Don't miss out on this opportunity to stay ahead in the evolving landscape of drone technology. To know more, visit: ===== Subscribe to FlytBase YouTube - Follow Us On - LinkedIn - Facebook - Twitter - Instagram - ## Transcript **[0:20]** hello and welcome to yet another session of nen 2024 my name is Neil and I'm from the customer success team here at FlytBase before we get get started please let me know how are things going on with you today are you liking the N sessions that we are hosting please drop your comments your experiences in the chat box and if you want you can also go ahead and show your appreciation and love for the event at the NES gen wall of love all of this will help us curate the right kind of sessions for the N gen editions coming forward so ladies and Gentlemen let's begin whether you're dipping your toes in the world of autonomous drone operations or fine-tuning your skills as a seasoned remote operator one thing that remains constant is airspace awareness in the age of autonomous drone Ops where drone flights take day and take off day and night instant situational awareness it not is not just a luxury **[1:20]** but a necessity you need situational awareness and practical insights to make Swift decisions that are crucial for the safety of your teams and general public and this is what we are going to cover in today's session so without further Ado let me introduce you to our speakers so first I'd like to introduce Dano who is the global sales manager for commercial and public sector sector skilles at Matrix space Radars danan is a global sales executive in the Aerospace and the commercial uas industry specializing in Radars computer vision AI machine learning iot and Edge Computing with a strong background in SAS and H sales models Dan has developed Global sales strategies that have resulted in significant Pipeline and revenue growth over the course of his career he has owned the entire sales cycles and closed business with multiple **[2:21]** Fortune 500 companies defense primes and Enterprise organizations and also in his free time Dan happily annoys his wife and his young son with his guitar and is deeply involved in building up the Boston Water po Community as both a player and a referee so welcome Dan happy to have you on the session thanks great to be here and looking forward to it I want to um now introduce our next speaker David Cameron so he's a field services engineer and lead us pilot at Matrix space David brings over three decades Decades of experience in law enforcement and has had a great tenure at the Campbell Police Department his diverse roles included s swart Financial crimes investigation and pioneering the Drone drone piloting program he's also notably established the Department's uas program and secured an FAA Beyond visual line of sight waiver culminating in the **[3:25]** launch of one of the nation's few drone first responder programs since joining Matrix space in 2023 David has been instrumental in addressing complex security challenges for a varied clientele blending his extensive law enforcement background with a Cutting Edge deep technology so welcome David glad to have you here thank you thanks for having me all right so before I proceed ahead I just have uh to walk you through a few housekeeping rules so let's keep this entire session a little engaging we're going to uh we have a chat section so if you have any specific questions with respect to know what we are going to tell you here please feel uh free to drop your U you know insights into that the session is also getting recorded as a lot of our audience is already asking don't worry we'll have these sessions for you and um please also do visit uh the boot section uh of Matrix uh space so their team is going to be there **[4:29]** if you want to network with with them get to know a little more about their offerings they'll be there and waiting for you and please show us some love and appreciation about nesg as well so tell us what you like what you don't use the hash NES genen on LinkedIn Twitter and we also have a special surprise for the top three posts that go live on social media and last but not the least I just want to take some time to thank our title sponsor which is DJI Enterprise and our goal sponsor sunflower labs for showing their invalu invaluable support for nesin 24 and with that Dan and David I hand it over to you the floor is all yours sweet thank you Neil really really appreciate it and um of course thank you to the entire uh flight based team for putting this on and for inviting David and myself to talk so we're excited about this so hi everybody so um yeah before we kind of jump off **[5:29]** here just a little disclaimer right up right up front um as if you couldn't tell David and I are American right um so that means that we have a particularly American lens that we're probably gonna be relying on throughout the course of the presentation but the one thing that I want to say is that the things that we're talking about here yeah we may reference particular FAA rule sets or particular U uh us uh legal codes or things like that but all of the strategies and the practicalities that we're talking about um absolutely apply uh to any country um particularly if you're in a country that utilizes the Sora risk assessment methodology so with that out of the way this is applicable to everybody here on the call that is interested in learning how to uh safely uh utilize detect and avoid technology to uh create airspace deconfliction so um that being being said **[6:31]** um got to switch screens here so really quickly about myself so thank you Neil again for the really great introduction um the only thing that I'll really add to it is that um you know for the past five years of my career I've been working very very very very deep in the detecting avoid uh space enabling baby loss programs um I've helped uh customers get um a number of true BB loss waivers so in other words replacing their groundbased visual observers human visual Observers servers with detec and avoid technology and um you know we'll be talking particularly a lot today um about uh drone's first responder programs and so I'm happy to say that I was part of the team that helped uh parand PD um out in Texas get their first true BV loss approval which was the first one for any police agency in the United States so I'm thrilled to um be talking with you about kind of the strategies that we utilize that help parland as well as a number of our Enterprise customers uh go fully Beyond visual line of sight with no human visual observers so with that out of the way uh **[7:36]** thank you guys David off to you great thanks guys thanks for having us uh Neil great introduction I appreciate it really the only thing I have to add to that is I I still am currently uh in the position of a reserve police officer with my city and still managing the Drone program and dfr program um with uh with the city um so let me tell you a little just a short Sni it about what we do at Matrix space to help enable some and enable be loss operations um we've developed the cell phone sized low power radar Source um to help enable be loss programs among other use cases so I know this is not really supposed to be a Pitch and we're not really going to do that so I'm going to leave it at that but we are enabling with radar along with other industry Partners uh to enable Beav loss operations around the nation so um so Campbell so what we're doing at Campbell we've had a dfr program started **[8:37]** since early 2023 we've had our uas program up and running since 2018 um and we've been doing the quote unquote traditional dfr program which is that Chul La Vista uh founded program visual Observer on the roof tele operator in a in a uh control station um and what we're doing now is we're trying to go to that you know dfr 2.0 and you know I'll I'll credit Anders Martin from Norway uas on on that uh coining of the term dfr 2.0 um which which is taking sensors like Optical and radar sensors and we're working with Partners right now to install those in Campbell um and I'm all and we're working on a concept of operation to submit to the FAA which will be a no vo waiver so we're looking to use this digital visual Observer technology which combines Optical radar and live adbn um and we're also considering adding in micro leather um detection capabilities into **[9:42]** the node um and we're we're we're approaching that very quick we're doing installations right now of our drone in the Box technology um and we should be up and running with our nodes here pretty soon under the traditional program as we wait to see what the FAA is going to say about our concept of operation um next slide there Dan so I mean really for those who don't know what dfr is it's SF for drone as first responder and really that program for uh the public is I'm sorry the dfr aims to really augment and enhance the safety of public and First Responders um by remotely deploying drones uh with various uh different sensors with a goal of arriving on scene before ground units and give that critical pre-arrival information uh it's not really really readily available to ground units um other **[10:45]** things that that we are using the dfr program for is a force multiplier they can respond to non-emergent calls that that may not require a ground unit to respond at all there are several non-emergent calls that are checking an area for certain things that we can have the Drone go out first check the area and if that that incident has cleared itself up then we don't even have to respond ground units to the scene leaving them or freeing them up to uh conduct other proactive activity or finish report writing um you know we're here in the United States we we have a large shortage of qualified candidates who want to be police officers and a lot of departments are looking and agencies are looking at augmenting their uh abilities with technology to try to try to become a Force multiplier with technology uh and this is just one of the ways we're doing that Dan I think back to you for visual Observer stuff oh I'm sorry I've got a case **[11:50]** study here for you real quick so uh just recently one of our drone Pilots uh was out operating we had a uh report of a miss elderly person with Alzheimer's it was during night and it was down in the 40s that's the uh Fahrenheit the American American units of uh and it's pretty cold for us here in California in the 40s and the it was only about three blocks away from where the person had walked away he was located in a long driveway laying down on the ground in front of a in front of a parked vehicle in in a uh somebody's driveway they would not have found him normally walking around because you couldn't see him from the roadway but he was able to locate him within just a few minutes of deploying the Drone using the thermal sensor and picking out uh and finding the uh the elderly subject who who had walked away uh and then just guided in our ground units and we call that a big save I mean had we **[12:54]** not located him he could have in that in that environment definitely caused him some harm if not death so I think that was a big win for drones and just first responder use of drones now I think back to you Dan yeah so so I think you guys are I I think you know we're preaching to the choir in a lot of ways I think everybody here kind of understands that you know the need for you know a real scale solution and you think about you know that particular use case um well how much better would it be if we weren't reliant on having people on rooftops so that the City of Campbell could expand their operations and um could fly whenever they need to they're not you know hampered by someone that might call out sick um and now can't play that visual Observer role so um that's really what we're talking about and hopefully with the **[13:55]** rest of this presentation um you guys have a good understanding of how to go about um you know presenting your safety case and then understanding some of the challenges that come with setting up these systems before that though um we got a poll um so please drop your answers in the chat but what do you think is the biggest challenge for implementing digital v as it cost Regulatory Compliance scalability integration with other with other drone platforms or something else entirely so we'd love to see your answers um and if we have enough time we'll make sure to address some of them at the end of the presentation so okay so let's talk about actually how to transition into digital visual observers so again this is relevant ultimately to whatever country you might be in particularly those that follow Sora or some sort of Sora adjacent methodology like here in the US Canada to a lesser extent but anyways um what are we really worried about here um why do we need this why can't we just go towards full electronic conspicuity have adsp in and out and well the answer is because of this **[15:00]** non-cooperative traffic non-cooperative traffic laws will vary depending on the country but quite simply it is an aircraft that is not broadcasting its location through some other some type of electronic means right now this does not mean that they are illegally flying um again different jurisdictions may vary but here in the United States for instance um if you're in class golf airspace you don't need it and there's a ton of class gol airspace in the United States we're a geographically huge Nation um so it means that you can have quite a few aircraft flying around at any given in time that are not broadcasting their location um and you know even though we hope that you know people are flying legally um and broadcasting their location when they're supposed to be within certain types of air space um it's it's not always the case um sometimes we're talking about non-ip rates as high as 11% with inside mandatory equip zones um and generally speaking at about 15% of the time any given aircraft um **[16:01]** in the United States outside of ads mandate range um is not broadcasting their location so this is a pretty significant problem that Regulators are very much aware of again numbers are going to vary depending on your jurisdiction country um all that stuff but it's a pretty big problem and nobody wants to see a drone take down a plane so this is what the real threat here and why we need that type of airspace awareness now humans aren't great at this um we're just not we bored tired we get sick we get distracted it can be cold it can be hot um and you know depending on the actual environment too there could be factors that limit the actual even if you're 100% on you're well caffeinated you're ready to go you could be it could be hazy um it could be a smoggy day um and you might not be able to see as far or you might have things like birds in the way that are obscuring where an object might be so it becomes tough um in case in point and D David's got a little bit to say about this but I'm going to show two images from a study that was published um a few years back **[17:04]** I think in 2016 that really shows how difficult it is for humans um even when they're doing their job correctly to differentiate between the distance between say an intruder uh drone the own ship and an intruder aircraft ready for this so in both these pictures the Drone is at 400 feet AGL and the plane is at 600 feet AGL I'll let this sit in a little bit because in one on that picture on the right it looks like about to collide right um David um you've done some um you've done a lot implementing vo training so um off to you for some color commentary yeah let me talk about that a little bit so you know I think one thing that has been um neglected in the Drone space has been the human factor um whether it's the rpck working by themselves and they're trying to watch the Drone and watch the screen or even if they have dedicated Vos the human Factor has you know I think studies in human factors are related directly to drone use and visual observers for drone use I think **[18:08]** have been neglected there have been a few studies on generally on human factors but I fall back on I was an Accident Reconstructionist with my police department and there's a lot of studies in Collision reconstruction that relate to the human factor you know the perception reaction times and what the brain needs to to discern or see an object and back through my days we uh of human factor training uh we came across from uh credit to Jeff Mard of the driver Research Institute an acronym called clips and it stands for contrast lighting pattern and size and really what is that is is you know the object that you're looking at does it have enough contrast from the background for you to even see it is there the proper lighting for you to see it is it a pattern that you recognize and then the size of the object how far away it is uh or the physical size of the object has a lot to do with how the brain determines **[19:10]** what they're looking at and you know I'll go back to my first drone that we got at Campbell Police Department was that DJI Phantom that was the really cool color was the Onyx color you know it was that gray one and then the first day that I put it up on a nice overcast cloudy day I just looked at it and I was like I I don't even know where it is you know it was not contrasting enough to its background and that can happen even in low altitude operations you know if you've got a darker drone that you're flying below tree level within visual line of sight you can easily lose it because there's not enough contrast between the background so right this this surge towards this digital obser visual Observer um I think is going to be a step forward big step forward in safety because you know currently the visual observers are just not I think a human eyeball the wet eyeball technique I I don't think has been the **[20:10]** safest and hasn't been studied enough I think the digital visual Observer is going to be that next big step um and we're hoping to make that happen pretty soon thanks all right so what is a digital visual Observer so we're basically it's another parlament and credit to um the guys at uh flying lion um for coming up with that particular term um but it it's a detect and avoid system it and it could be groundbased it could be airborne it could be a radar it could be an electrooptical system it could be an acoustic system doesn't really matter ultimately however you're going to incorporate these things into your conops is going to look fundamentally the same way um but that's really what we're talking about here our daa systems um and the real thing to consider and and David and I have the benefit of talking with all sorts of different organizations um different end users agencies uh police uh police **[21:11]** departments Etc um but the thing to remember is you're not going to incorporate these things the same way that you would a human visual Observer into your conops okay well how do we go about doing that I wanted to call out this particular chart my my colleague akaki who's speaking on a panel a little bit later today uh did this as part of a blog post um but it's one of the better describers of you know how to think about um the different types of volumes or different types of surveillance volumes um so when you put out something like a radar system um you've got essentially your surveillance volume in other words how far can the radar see out right um and then within that you've got a smaller volume the Declaration volume so what is that that's where you're getting a about 50% of your tracks um radar paraments but we we'll say detections right that's where your 50% threshold is and then within that you've got your operational volume and that's the area that you can **[22:13]** safely fly your aircraft so what does that mean okay it means that you have to have a buffer right there is a Time buffer that needs to be considered um so putting out one radar panel that sees say 5 kilomet 10 km 20 km doesn't mean that you can fly 5 10 20 kilm it means that you can only fly a fraction of that because you need enough room to get out of the way of an aircraft that comes in there now when we structure these different conops there you can figure this out um rtca um the international standards body has created um a um a set set of equations we've built our own internal calculator to help try to understand the different major variables that impact how large your ultimate operational volume to be some of these variables how are you actually getting out of the way is it automated is it human initiated are you actually manually flying the Drone um how maneuverable is that drone how how high up are you flying and how far down do you need to descend all of these things **[23:16]** have different impacts on how big the area that you can operate in um and with the complex equations uh put out by rtca and d381 um you can kind of figure out okay well how much how much time do I actually have to get out of the way and how much room do I do I have to fly here's what this looks like in real life um this is a mockup that we did for a potential customer you can see the large um yellow out or the kind of semi-translucent yellow outlines that's our surveillance volume um or our declaration volume rather excuse me um the distance um and the distance to that um and the uh hexagons in the center Center here the blue hexagons um that is our buffer space and the blue hexagons and the dark yellow in the center are the operational volume in other words where you can fly safely knowing that you have enough time to deconflict David really quickly over to you because I think we're we've got about five minutes left and I want we should definitely leave some time for Q&A um how are **[24:20]** you going about implementing your daa systems in Campbell so right now um we have uh we're lucky to have a 366 foot business Tower within our city and we are currently uh in the midst of installing both a digital uh Optical system I'm sorry an optical system and a radar system um from Optical system is from Dr Drone the radar system is from Matrix space along with alive adbn um our goal is and then also installing our docs our goal is to get to this single person flight system using digital visual Observer now I've been working with a partner uh Brandon Carr from Pand Texas in writing our conop that we are very soon going to be submitting to the FAA uh with our concept of operations uh hoping to get that approved with digital visual observers and having it as a Novo system so that's that's where we're at right now **[25:22]** um Dan I mean these are the system this is an example of the systems that uh we are installing on that Tower uh in some form or fashion and then trying to get it all into one pane of glass so we've integrated with our partners and we're trying to put all the information along with audio audio detect a audio detection yeah um and uh the radar and Optical detection all into one paint of glass yeah so some final thoughts here before uh we wrap up so guys there's a lot to remember with this um and so it it's a good idea to find a company or a partner that has experience in doing true BB loss and to work with them if if you're unfamiliar with it um love for it to be us but there are a lot of good providers out there there are a lot of smart people and of course we do not have a particular Monopoly on the BB loss you know uh on the the BV loss marketplace right um but it's doable **[26:26]** um just make sure you're deliberate you're evaluating your infrastructure requirements in David's case he's incorporating several different types of daa systems to cover his particular airspace um and so make sure that you're evaluating that closely um and you know go be deliberate and engage your Regulators early work with them because in a lot of cases in a lot of countries they're still learning how they want to actually regulate this process um some countries are further along than others um but engagement with your regulator learning how they think something's going to be safe um and having that good cross dialogue with them is going to be to your benefit and of course it doesn't hurt to start with visual observers either just to build your reputation with those uh with those Regulators um so be be thoughtful be deliberate um and engage early with regulators and partners that can um scale you for Success okay with that thank thank you all so much really really appreciate it **[27:30]** please uh feel free to connect with David or myself on LinkedIn of um come feel free to check out the booth afterwards and I think with that um I think we're going to leave uh whatever what time left uh for Q&A yeah sure sure and and David thank you so much for you know walking us through this I'm sure the audience learned a lot I learned a lot about airspace awareness so thank you for sharing your insights we do have a couple of questions so I'll just uh um get that in right so we have a question how soon can I purchase a unit if that's readily available we're shipping now if um that's something you're interested in please connect with me on LinkedIn and I'll be happy to talk you through uh the purchasing process all right we have one more question um so I think this would go for David David you mentioned something about dfr 2.0 so can you just help us understand what does it constitute like yeah so again that that term was not coined by me that was **[28:31]** Anders Martin and Norway uas dfr 2.0 is that is the next evolution of dfr so that's going to the visual using a digital visual Observer instead of a human visual Observer to monitor airspace so that's that dfr 2.0 really trying to turn the operation into a oneperson operation tell operator only who uses the fused digital visual Observer system sys to monitor the airspace for crude aircraft and launch and recover drones and and conduct operations so that's the dfr 2.0 so it's the next Evolution all right uh so we have one more question for the audience uh from the audience so in context of bvos operations what are the key features that uh you know a radar system should have like from an architectural point of view or a tech stack point of view yeah so I can this so so it depends a little bit on the radar system that you're using right like so ultimately the range of the radar system is going to **[29:35]** dictate how many radar systems that you need in a particular area so if you are you know spending dropping the cash and have the power capabilities to support a radar system that can see 10 20 miles then great then you only need one of those right but if you those are big expensive and power hungry so if you need to distribute smaller ones of course you got to find places to physically put put them that will allow you to do that with clear line of sight um somewhere that has power somewhere that has Network capability um so you know to really kind of think about and and this is true too for any of the other kind of more tactically designed daa systems uh some of the more popular electronic uh or electrooptical systems or you know acoustic systems you're you may have to set up multiple to cover a large area particularly you're covering like something the size of a city um so you know making sure that you have you know something to elevate uh your daa system uh to maintain clear of line of sight like a pole or a mast uh top of a building um things like those types of **[30:37]** considerations come into play all right got it um thanks then I think we also had a poll so let me just quickly show the results so that we can get uh some insights on that so the question was what do you think is the biggest challenge for implementing digital vs uh 10% of the audience says it's cost 65% says it's Regulatory Compliance and 25% say that it's scalability any thoughts on that Dan O David yeah I think cost um cost is you know is scaled in different different aspects so like for an agency it's not just the cost of the equipment it's cost of Manpower you know it running a current dfr system we have to look at you know the overtime or regular time have a human visual Observer on the roof um who also has benefits and you know health care and everything plus their salary or if they're on overtime what does that cost versus The Upfront cost of Hardware that down the road **[31:43]** will save you the money um on uh on the cost part so I think that's that's probably the number one is cost which is proh can be cost prohibitive but that you need to really structure um and and investigate how much it's going to cost for human versus a digital vo um that can work in all weather you know it doesn't matter whether it's cold outside you know if it's really cold I don't want to put my my human vo outside on a rooftop somewhere but my digital vo can power through it and do what it needs to do and you can continue operations so the cost savings down the road is where where it comes all right David thanks thanks for sharing your insights on that we are a little over time so um sadly it's time to say goodbye but uh thanks again David and uh Dan for coming uh and host like being on the session sharing your insights uh thanks for taking the time to attend this session and this goes for our audience as **[32:47]** well uh The Matrix space Booth is in the Expo SE section so that happens to be on your left their their team is going to be there from 12: to 1:00 p.m. ET uh Dan you can correct me if I'm wrong um no that's correct yeah so you can head over to the Expo section speak to their team get to know a little more about their offerings and yeah that's it thanks Dan thanks David for coming here and sharing your insights really appreciate your time and uh it's good to see what you're doing like I said airspace awareness is the need of the hour you know it's helping us save uh a lot of time and effort and eventually leading us like mitigating risks right that's what we need to ensure like from a flight safety point of view yeah all right thank you so much yeah thank you NE thank you audience have a great day you too have a great day