# Introduction to Future of Aerial Autonomy

- Event: NestGen ’25
- Published: March 7, 2025
- Length: 34:05
- Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/K5ztO4gR3Kc/

> 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.

## Transcript

**[0:20]** good morning everyone welcome to today's session we about to get into another session to explore the Drone operations uh in a whole new altitude I'm shy your pilot for the next half an hour and I promise you a small flight into this insightful session today's session is very special we are going to explore our two new products of FlytBase flight Bas Pro and FlytBase air let me build some suspense before we dive in I have a few housekeeping rules for you if you have any questions drop it in our question inbox question and answer box and we'll tackle them at the end of the session this session is recorded So if you miss anything you can always revisit it later join the conversation on social use # nin on LinkedIn and Twitter to share insights and tag our speakers also a huge huge thanks to our nting 25 sponsors

**[1:24]** the one who are leading the way and the industry forward now let's di right I'm thrill to introduce our speaker for the day Kel kurari Kel is the business development manager at flight Bas and it's here to launch the flight Bas Pro and flight Bas a with all of you whether you're managing a handful of drones or an entire fleet flight based Pro gives you the total control and liability you need so you can say goodbye to man hles and hello to streamline one to one to many drone operations and not to forget how the flight based a or a intelligence for robots is actually upgrading oh I'm sorry AI upgrading the Drone operations but to know more about this let's get to kosa kosa welcome the stage is yours thank you so thank you for the warm welcome shuti uh pleasure being here pleasure talking to everyone uh what a

**[2:27]** right nen has been this year it's been amazing to see so many people tuning in to watch all the exciting sessions that we have and I'm really excited about this session because today we're going to dive deep into uh you know how 2024 shaped up what the dock industry looked like what uh is in store for 2025 there's a lot of Buzz around AI a lot of Buzz around the future of Automation and I think um you know factoring all of that in Flight bases come up with two new products that's flight Bas Pro and FlytBase air so would love to to you know take a quick recap of 2024 and then talk about uh what we have in store for 2025 so with that I'll just share my screen and uh we can jump right into it one note that I'll make as in when I keep speaking I have a tendency to you know overe explain and just keep talking so please feel free to drop in your questions at any point and shy you can interrupt me at any time so that we can pause at a particular slide maybe explain a couple of Concepts

**[3:28]** more in depth uh especially around flight based Pro and FlytBase a right so with that what is today's session about uh it's titled introducing the future of aial autonomy now before we talk about the future uh let's dive into how 20204 look like um with the DJ at Doc one that released in 2023 there was a lot of adoption of you know early adopters adopting the doc for remote operations things were a little murky around regulations things were picking up slowly but 2024 was a game changer we have so many uh drone solution providers Enterprises that have deployed docks for their particular use cases so we seeing dock adoption across different geographies for different use cases and that's been amazing to see because a lot of the folks that we are talking with on a daily have been iterating over the process and in 2024 we learned a lot we faced a lot of challenges as a team and we learned a lot and

**[4:32]** when I say we it's not just flight based it's the entire ecosystem that's flight base the Drone solution provider and the end user so all of us we learned a lot and I will share a little bit about the challenges that we've identified as patterns and how our products are helping solve that uh in 2025 but what else what what what's happening around us right what's 2025 all about uh I have to tell you it's been an amazing year there is been so much that's happening uh open AI perplexity deep seek Gemini every day you wake up there's something new or Innovative happening uh in the space of AI and what all the pundits are talking about is how AI which is uh currently in the digital realm is going to trickle down into the Physical Realm so what what I mean about that is how AI is going to power automation not from a software standpoint but also from you know in the industry of drones Robotics and more all right before we jump into the challenges and you know

**[5:38]** the entire session we let's do a quick recap uh what I'm sharing via this slide is the wave theory um we very strongly believe that the adoption of docks for large customers happens in waves so just very quickly explaining there are four waves uh when it comes to dock adoption so that's wave zero 1 two and wave three wave zero is the proof of concept stage so here customers are working with a drone solution provider to get a demo they've not installed a dock or made a purchase but they're still trying out the dock so they're trying out all the features getting their hands uh around the product learning how to fly getting used to uh how the dock behaves and how to set it up for example Wave 1 is when they finally make the first uh purchase decision so they buy one or two docks again they're running a pilot program they have not fully committed to docks they want to explore different use cases they want to explore different points of integration uh in this stage and this typically

**[6:44]** lasts between 1 and five months now this is a very crucial stage because at in this part uh customers need a lot of handholding and more than that there in this stage you start scoping out what the future will look like for your doc program internally uh during this phase a lot of customers talk about it security or data security challenges it compliances they talk about different points of integration and they also talk about uh specific features that they would want once wave one is successful say we've cleared it Security checks we' have cleared or we have discovered the point of Integrations that's when customers decide to move to uh typically two to6 loock range of uh deployment and that's wave two here customers now start talking about boss compliance they start talking about integrating those uh Enterprise Integrations that they had scoped out in the first place and in some

**[7:45]** cases the it security compliance happens in parallel uh so wave two is also you know very heavy when it comes to customers uh filling out those data security questionnaires with their it teams and this takes a long time so this takes six to 12 months so within a year so 2024 a lot of customers have moved from wave zero to wave two and now a lot of customers are talking about wave three which is multide deployments here you have to talk you know here customers start talking about Advanced team collaboration site management they talk about complex data orchestration today what we're going to focus on is how some of the product lines on in the flight bases Arsenal flight Bas Pro and FlytBase air is enabling are enabling conversations in wave 0 1 and two before we get into the actual product and what entails let's talk about some of the challenges that we have identified throughout this journey of most of the customers that we

**[8:45]** have worked with so first as I mentioned is uh data security and it compliance purchase docks cannot be scaled until and unless you get a green flag from your it team that's that's the hard Truth uh the nuance here is docs are different from drones docs integrate into your it Network unlike drones which are stand alone you have an RC you have a pilot you can pull it out of your van start flying remove the SD card transfer all the data onto your computer and then uh have a very manual workflow whereas docs they're fully integrated into your network so there is a lot of um checks that you need to pass when it comes to actually deploying these on site second is uh as I mentioned in wave one a lot of customers start talking about points of integration and currently in the software ecosystem um docs are uh treated as a data collection tool but not a lot of people are talking

**[9:47]** about how uh we can transfer those data that data into a third party application or how we can trigger the Drone via external alarms and sensors so a lot of customers are you know out of it as to how they can integrate these systems and it becomes very important because in wave zero sorry wave 1 and wave two customers are generating Roi calculations so they're they're making a calculation on how effective their entire Investments have been their upfront Investments have been and that's where having Integrations allows them to Target multiple use cases I'll dive dive into that in the next slides and but because of that they're able to justify the ROI of the entire operation to the their management the third is around cumbersome mission mission planning around Assets in 2024 a lot of uh inspection companies oil and gas companies large Enterprises dived into docked operations and they were jumping in from a drone

**[10:47]** primarily a drone based workflow and that's where uh the flexibility of planning missions via drones was lacking in dock base operations so I'll touch upon how we are solv in that at FlytBase and the fourth is uh lack of intelligence so these dogs as I mentioned was were were Prim are primarily being used to collect data but how do you make sense of that data in real time uh how do you use your preferred analytical Platforms in the downstream to make sense of the data that you're collecting so those are the four challenges I'll double click on each one of them in the next slides uh very quickly the first challenges I mentioned um is the data security and it compliance issue that most customers are facing in that there are four Trends the first is production scaling is being blocked uh because you're not getting the GRE customers are not getting the green light from their management there are complex inter interval sorry there are complex internal approvals so there are a lot of checks a lot of questionnaires um a lot of uh architecture

**[11:52]** reviews that customers or teams need to perform to get that green light and every C customer is different every organization is different so navigating that becomes difficult third is data access restriction so this is all the data that you're collecting who has access to the data who's authorized to use the data um right and U how do you protect that data is the third item and the fourth is as a result of 1 two three excuse me wave 1 and wave two deployments are being delayed one of the easiest ways or the first checks that a lot of it teams are looking for our uh certification and com compliance reports uh FlytBase has ISO 270001 soft 2 type two and gdpr for the wave zero to wave 1 deployment these certifications for our cloud-based deployments are you know a sigh of relief for most Enterprises when we give the it their it teams these documents um the

**[12:57]** the conversation shifts around all right now let's review these documents and that entire process builds a lot of confidence in the software platform it builds the Enterprise maturity that FlytBase has but when we talk about wave two and wave three there are a few more uh aspects that it teams are looking for and uh you know they're looking for um they're asking questions around firewall protection so when we integrating the hardware um is there a firewall that you know is there a firewall that blocks All Foreign comps of the doc um they talk about secure allow list so what are the IPS that we need to allow on our on our firewall uh what are the fully qualified domain names that FlytBase has and owns do we need to really communicate with multiple IPS or is it just a set list of ips that we need to communicate with uh the third is realtime traffic monitoring so can we a lot of ID teams have discovered and teams at FlytBase as well that the dock

**[13:59]** particularly the DJI do is a very chattery system it likes to talk to a lot of endpoints which are not required for its actual operations so when teams discover that they want to understand where the dock is trying to communicate and with the secured allow list are those end points owned by FlytBase are those even required for operations with our Doc and then the third fourth item is blocking those comps in an automated manner allowing only a set of Ip so let me demonstrate how we are solving that at FlytBase we introduced the FlytBase shield uh earlier last year in the shield what we do is uh when you connect an air device you able to visualize you're able to visualize all the end points that the doc tries to communicate with and

**[14:59]** based on the allowed domains only a specific allowed domains are uh you know permissible for the dog to communicate with all the other events are blocked so here you can apologize I apologize for that um here you can see as you can see here you can see that there are 44,000 events that have been blocked by the firewall and you can visualize where all these end points lie uh with the region and the exact IP uh IP address as well so here you can see in China there are these specific endpoints that the doc wants to communicate with and with the FlytBase air you're able to block these uh these points of communication with the dock and allow only a set list of domains as you can see with with FlytBase uh which are owned by FlytBase so here you can see with the help of FlytBase shield we are able to provide firewall protection we are able to uh secure only a specific list of domains

**[16:00]** uh it teams are able to visualize the traffic and uh The Unwanted traffic is being blocked automatically this is a big sigh of relief for a lot of ID teams the conversation completely shifts when you empower the user with realtime data they feel much more uh confident about the maturity of the platform and the majority of operations at you know the level at which FlytBase is operating so the flight Bas Shield helps solve for the first challenge the Second Challenge as I mentioned is a lot of customers discover points of integration throughout the process and then when it comes to integrating the data collected Upstream with their Downstream systems most platforms don't allow for these Integrations flight Bas in 2024 released flinks and I'm happy to announce that flight based Pro the variant that we've recently released integrates with uh you know thirdparty applications with the help of flinx so flinks

**[17:05]** stands for flight based links uh with Pro you get three type of flinks first is the alarm Flink you can integrate with any alarm Source such as an intruder alarm um or U or a CCTV camera for example and upon an external trigger you can automate a drone response to that to the location from which the sensors triggering or calling FlytBase so imagine if there's a location a h which is an intruder alarm and an intruder tries to jump over a fence for example the sensor goes off the exact geoc coordinates of that sensor are TR uh passed onto FlytBase and FlytBase then triggers your drone to the location of the alarm that's alarm flinks really helpful in sight security industrial security video streaming Flink is um where you can export the video feed into a video management system like genitech or Milestone so you can Empower your uh security op

**[18:08]** steam uh in on an industrial site for example with realtime data uh video stream from the Drone and data processing Flink is for mapping use cases construction monitoring use cases uh we signed over for you know 30 fling Partners last year some of these names are very familiar and they all in one way or another fall into the bucket the three buckets that I mentioned in the previous slide so we have partnered with pix 4D drone deploy uh D drone Milestone gench you name it so there are all of these different applications Target specific use cases so with the help of flings you're able to use the same dog for multiple use cases this again ties back to the justification of the return on investment for the for the up front investment in a dog uh I'll play some quick videos to give you a gist of how some of these um flinks work this is a gench integration with FlytBase so you're we can export the video

**[19:11]** feed from the Drone and dock into your gench uh video management system so your security folks have real time uh eyes in the sky uh when when there is a schedule Patrol for example or if there is a emergency response similar U data processing we have an integration with pix 4D so you can plan a mission on FlytBase here the drones flying doing a grid Mission as you can see collecting all of the data and once the data is collected you can export the data uh using the flight based media export function and once the export is available you can then share it with an application such as drone deploy or pix 4D so you can share it to a Flink uh and you can share it to pix 4D and once you trigger this event pix 4D collects all of the data creates a map and then gives you

**[20:12]** an output so here on the right hand side of the FlytBase console you can see uh the toggle for pix 4D and you can jump into the model here you see that with the mission that we flew we able to very quickly generate a detailed model on pix 4D so um overall the Second Challenge just the recap was how do we integrate uh Enterprise applications flings opens up with the help of flight based Pro flings opens up multiple use cases that help justify the ROI for a customer jumping on to the third Point uh is um as I mentioned around asset inspection so planning missions um not just in 2D or 3D but how do we improve the experience that that was the problem statement that we were faced with with 2D based Mission planning you don't have elevation data challenging with 3D you have elevation data but you don't have realtime visuals on

**[21:14]** or or or you know changing visuals of you know say heavy machinery on site uh electrical poles substations Etc so it then becomes a challenge to plan missions the way manual operators did it is they would fly the Drone in real time with with a visual line of sight record those waypoints on the DJI pilot app and then uh save that mission so recording your mission in with a visual line of Set uh operation so with FlytBase Pro we've introduced a 5D Mission planner where you can actually you can remotely fly the Drone and record each Waypoint when you record a waypoint on FlytBase so you can record multiple waypoints and then save that mission when you're recording Waypoint you're capturing the drone's location you're capturing the drone's altitude and the PTZ setting so pitch tilt Zoom so those are the five Dimensions which you can record with one click and your your Pilots are actually flanked so they're very confident of where the Drone is and how the visual on the on the video

**[22:18]** feed looks like with so these five Dimensions help for a better Mission planning experience uh the fourth item and the fourth challenge is what brings us into 2025 5 uh I personally am really excited for this we recently launched flight based air but the precursor to that were the challenges that customers were facing so the fourth challenge is lack of intelligence is in in live data analysis right docs are collecting data but how do we make sense of that data that's the entire problem even if we collecting the data and exporting it into some sort of an AI model and getting Analytics post facto uh that's not very powerful because uh we are not making decisions in real time so in emergency response Public Safety industrial security you want to make decisions in real time and that's where um we came up with flight Bas air air stands for aial intelligence for

**[23:19]** robotics with air we have jumped into the realm of uh artificial intelligence and this is not just um detection of objects per se but it is an entire road map of how we are implementing you know a long-term strategy of inculcating uh different AI practices into docked operations so um currently what we have is we have real time analytics on the platform where the Drone in real time does object detection so currently we have two classes those are vehicles and humans uh so FlytBase is able to in real time do detection of vehicles and humans you can also count objects in real time as you can see and this operation is being done from quite a lot of height so the angle of attack is very Steep and the detection you can see even on a busy screen like this is quite

**[24:21]** accurate with detection we are also recording the video feed uh in case the operators not on the screen and we are also alerting the operator on uh on intrusion for example or on detection uh so the entire workflow allows for an automated experience um using artificial intelligence and uh We've we've we've shipped over 50 plus units across the globe we launched air in January this year uh and uh the response has been overwhelmingly nice a lot of people tend to ask then how are you doing this right is this happening on cloud are cloud-based models for re detection really uh that accurate are they reliable the answer is yes and no so we're not doing it on cloud we're doing it with the help of an edge device so FlytBase air is an edge compute device which connects directly to your doc uh The Edge device has an Nvidia GPU it has

**[25:25]** an Intel CPU um it has local storage so you can locally store your media files on air we have one TB of storage out of the box you can expand it using SSD slots uh we have four RJ45 ethernet ports on the dock which can help you connect external devices in the future so with air you're future proofing your doc operations given that we are providing you a lot of compute on the edge so all the models that we have today are probably utilizing 20 to 25% of the compute that the AI device has in the future we will add more models our partners are building models in parallel so they'll bring their own models onto FlytBase a and we'll also have you know we have a long road map of a lot of items that are yet to come and the air device which is deployed on the edge close to the dock allows us to do that do that

**[26:26]** from a compute standpoint so that's where a as a device or the strategy that we are taking future proofs doc operations for for a lot of customers moving on uh with air we are also launching a bring your own Model A bring your own model program or a by program so our partners you know they they are developing custom AI models they they can you add that to the air device and that way we are bringing in a lot of uh you know customers partners are able to build differentiation with with the help of air we also have a system integrator program that allows Partners to integrate security fences cameras and build a unique solution with the help of air uh with that we also released pro this year with flight based Pro all the previous challenges we we mentioned are being addressed so we have Enterprise gr data security uh we have Enterprise Integrations with the help of flings that I mentioned uh we have realtime AI given once you integrate with anir

**[27:31]** device and we have 5D machine planning for asset inspections and inspection based workflows or Mission planning in general um the price point of pro is what really excites me so we want to reduce the barrier to entry completely we're moving away from a PE drone or a pearl dock pricing model to a per organization model so we are Char charging $1,000 per year or $999 per year um independent of the number of docks so you can add one to 10 to 20 30 as many docks as you want to the same uh to the same skew you pay as you fly so the the more you fly the more you pay we get you onto a pay as youo model excuse me with FlytBase Pro you get 5,000 video viewer minutes up front and then you get 2,000 minutes every month with flight based Pro uh customers can start small they can scale at their own pace

**[28:34]** and they can expand when they're ready so expansion means moving on to flight based Enterprise or moving on to uh you know a pre-bundled uh pay up front model with with flight Bas Pro as well so flight Bas Pro offers that flexibility a as you go pricing model so that helps companies uh as we like to say they get to you know they get set and pro so they become Professionals in their field uh by starting small so that was my time um just one minute over happy to take any questions that there may be um so shti do you do see any questions we do have few questions so the first question is from Alexander he asked what OS does it run off custom LS distro or what uh I am assuming that the question is around FlytBase air uh so we are running it running on Linux our entire work the framework is on Linux so that's

**[29:34]** the OS that we use with flight Bas AR it's a plug-in Play device so with the flight based Pro or Enterprise or any subscription of flight based Pro sorry FlytBase you can just plug plug in your doc connect to the internet and uh the device will be visible on your flight Bas console nice we have two more questions from Alexander uh the first one is is the docking station emitting a Wi-Fi signal for the Drone to connect to uh okay so the way the Drone and the dock communicate is by on an RF protocol uh that's the primary link a backup link can also be where uh you depending on the geography that you you are in DJI provides a 4G dongle which you can connect with the Drone directly and in that case you are uh communicating with the drone over a 4G protocol uh so that's the second uh C2 link that you can you know use for your drone waste sorry for your dog operations nice so this is the

**[30:37]** final question what is your opinion on having a privately hosted AI model for drones who yes I see there's more versus yeah sorry what is your opinion on having a privately hosted AI mod roomes versus using a cloud hosting host that's a great question Alexander and I think I covered that with the um with the air deployment strategy we have we believe that deploying AI close to the dock on the edge is a better so a uh privately hosted AI model is much more reliable than hosting on cloud given that most customers are deploying docks in uh areas with low connectivity low bandwidth they using starlink they don't have you know stable very stable Internet connect connectivity uh relying on cloud-based AI models becomes tricky number one um and number two it just adds a lot more latency so deploying closer to the edge we

**[31:37]** are streaming the video directly to the air device and detection overlays are being uh imposed on the edge so that's just a much more reliable uh mode of operation and also with a privately hosted model there is a lot you can scale um that can also happen with Cloud just countering myself but in general I think that's that's my opinion nice we should address just one more question and then we can reset it off so does this Hardware work with nedia ISAC Sim or ISAC Ros in that case is it possible to work with Ros to with DDS mle oh that's a great question and uh let me just read that out right so um I would love to pass this question on to our product team and I would love to get back to you on this I personally haven't built the product myself so I'm not sure if I can answer this uh to the best of my knowledge yeah so we'll

**[32:39]** get back to you unfortunately it's Anonymous um if if it if it had a name to it we would I would just DM them right after um I think that pretty much works we are already running off time so we should quickly show this thanks for this exiting session we had addressed all the four oh um J it was uh Jim Fab who had asked a question about Ru uh we'll be getting back to you Jim thank you so much thank you for your question Jim yeah we're just running out of time so we'll be getting back to you soon um thanks go once again for this amazing session for those who missed out do not worry we have a recording that's coming up so you can watch it as well um so that's the closing end thing want to say as a closing no thank you so much thank you for the questions as well and if you need anything um or if you have any questions around flight Bas Air flight based Pro or in general if you need any kind of help uh feel free to reach out to me I've just

**[33:41]** pasted my email address in the chat um so yeah you can just drop an email and happy to help sure that's us so thank you so much for being a part um happy morning and goodbye goodbye thank you so much thank you it's