# Detect and Avoid Tech: A Critical Element for BVLOS Waiver Success?

- Event: NestGen ’23
- Published: March 15, 2023
- Length: 45:21
- Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/NTqFv7fnDGw/

> 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

Should detecting cooperative & non-cooperative aircrafts within your operational range be essential for BVLOS ops? Attend the session to find out.

## Transcript

**[0:09]** thank you hello everybody Welcome to one of the most exciting sessions of nesgen 23. so with an emerging focus on drone autonomy this session will give you a deep learning on how to conduct private pilotless BBA lost flights while keeping safety in mind you'll get an understanding as to how to detect cooperative and non-cooperative aircrafts and why they're important for BV loss operations right so flying a dawn Beyond visual line of sight is becoming increasingly popular due to the numerous benefits it offers however to ensure that operations go smoothly a safe air space is essential this helps mitigate the risks associated with BB loss operations such as mid air collisions or even people and property on ground if you've noticed majority of today's flights require a visual Observer to monitor the skies for potential obstacles that the Drone May encounter in turn the Observer has to notify the pilot immediately thus any lapse in communication is very dangerous but as drone operations expand relying solely on human intervention becomes

**[1:13]** increasingly challenging so worry not to show you the way forward we have Dan with us today director and Global sales at customer success Iris automation joining us today Iris automation specializes in monitoring the airspace for large-scale drone Auto operations making sure no two aircrafts ever Collide mid-air Dan has aided their Vision to incorporate the detect and avoid daa systems into all aircrafts in the coming future with a strong background in SAS Edge Computing internet iot and reguliance compliance Dan has worked with several Fortune 500 companies his help contract custom SAS Integrations and navigate complex regulatory environments he has a long history of working in technology including time by the Oracle and varisk analytics Dan holds an undergrad degree from Connecticut College with honors and has even taken additional courses at the tops what's more in his free time free time Dan enjoys playing the guitar and entertains his wife and son so before we jump into dance session I need to share a few housekeeping rules so

**[2:16]** please type your questions in the Q a tab of the session and it'll be answered after the presentation the session is going to be recorded and will be published soon also we have an Irish automation both in the Expo session so please make sure you visit it and finally please remember to capture your favorite moments from the session and share it on Twitter by using the hashtag nesgen a few lucky people who share it might have a surprise in store and also not last but not the least I would like to thank our sponsors and DJI Enterprise who's our title sponsor and volatas aspects who's a platinum sponsor right so with that over to you Dan great well thanks so much Natasha let me just get my uh screen shared here we'll bring up the presentation and then we'll jump right into it yep all right uh can you see my screen yes we can excellent all right well thank you again Natasha and thank you especially to the entire flight based team for hosting us um I'm sure some of the folks that are kind of trickling in at this point got to see um Ira CEO John

**[3:18]** Danish on the regulatory panel discussion earlier today so we're thrilled that um Natasha you and everybody else of light base could uh host myself for this discussion and uh John for the earlier discussion and thank you to everybody that's joining right now so really thrilled to be talking with you um God detect and avoid technology is kind of one of these uh discussions that just God honors so many questions and it seems like it's such a uh hot button topic for a lot of people so I'm excited to talk to you everybody about it um and hopefully kind of give you guys some best practices for incorporating daa Tech into uh BD loss waivers so you know a little bit about Iris Automation and I'm gonna also cover a couple biases that um I think might be worth kind of discussing up front uh but a little bit about Iris automation we are uh detect and avoid manufacturer uh we're based on Reno Nevada uh about 35 employ uh employees currently and um we have some really great

**[4:20]** key investors um and we've been in the space for for a while now going on about God we're coming up on eight years so founded in 2015. um and our customers using the system um using various iterations of our system have been able to achieve 40 BB loss approvals globally we also um sit on a number of different um you know uh standards bodies rtca ASTM um you're okay we are also deeply involved in jarus and of course have participated in different FAA and Transport Canada uh programs uh such as Beyond The bvloss Arc as well as some testing programs up in Canada with uh the national Resource Council or natural resource research it's going to be a long presentation guys um the national research Council which is basically Canada's version of NASA so um that's a little bit about us so those biases that I talked about well

**[5:20]** first of all you know if you couldn't tell from my accent I am an American um and you know most of our customer base is based here in the United States so this presentation may be a little bit U.S Centric uh it is U.S Centric uh let's call it speed to Spade here um so I I'm gonna do my best to try to give best practices that would be relevant to anybody in any jurisdiction that's looking for BB loss approvals or incorporating uh detecting devoid into their conop but um yeah I am going to kind of fall back on U.S regulations just because that's kind of the space that I I exist in the most right uh the other bias that I want to call out well I mean I'm the sales guy right like it's my job to sell this product and I've been at Iris for about three years now um so that being said I don't want this to be a sales presentation I'm going to work really really hard not to make this a sales presentation I'm going to be talking about different types of detect and avoid technology how it's relevant to BB loss operations the pros and cons of this and

**[6:22]** none of this is supposed to be a victory victory lap for Iris automation it's about making sure that you all have the power and um are educated about the different types of systems that are out there that different types of things that you need to consider when utilizing daa as part of the bvlots application so I'm going to do my best to make sure that I don't overly kind of try to sell you guys on Iris stuff I hope that after the conversation you talk to me because you're interested but um this is not going to be a sales page and I'm going to work hard enough not to make it such okay sound good everybody all right let's jump in a little bit so we're going to cover a few different topics here so I'm going to start by kind of expressing the problem of seeing a boy so why this is a difficult thing to solve where it's coming from and the regulations at least the U.S regulations and before kind of getting into a description of what the Techno boy technology is we'll talk about some um we'll talk about Cooperative detection systems visual observers kind of the advantages disadvantages of those before getting into non-cooperative detect and

**[7:25]** avoid technology types and finally getting into where these all fit in within the regulatory approval process and we'll have some q a time at the end to see and avoid requirements oh yeah I said this is going to be a little bit U.S Centric so of course I'm going to quote U.S regulations here so um the cnavoid requirements and every country has variations of this very various wording but it all kind of comes back to the same thing uh 14 CFR 9113 subsection B in the United States makes it really clear that people that are operating an aircraft need to be able to see and avoid other aircraft really cut and dry part 107.31 subsection a again from 14 CFR um kind of makes this a little bit clearer and probably 107 deals more with commercial drone operations uh but the idea here is that you have to be able to see the unmanned aircraft and because you have to observe the air airspace for other air

**[8:26]** traffic and Hazards and determine that the unmandated crowd that you are flying does not endanger the life and property of another okay so the seeing avoid requirements are really really clear um we it is incumbent on us as drone operators to make sure that we are avoiding other aircraft this is not easy to do um here's a picture from one of our onboard systems um and if you're looking at this there is a kind of helpful little bounding box down here on the corner um that shows the detected Intruder but you can imagine that if you're flying especially if you have like a handheld system with a really small like cell phone sized um you know display it can be really really difficult to pick out um even if you're looking our cameras are monochromatic but even if you're looking at a color camera or a colored image that it could be really really difficult to pick out among all the other noise in the image um you know a potential Intruder and that's really the Crux of the issue here how do we maintain how do we make sure that we are staying

**[9:27]** compliant with those C and avoid requirements and depending on what we're looking at it can be really really hard to pick out these different types of objects so um if anybody has a gas feel free to drop in the chat before I kind of reveal what exactly this object is but um this is a non-cooperative aircraft specifically it is a paraglider so very small no radio no adsb transponder there's very low to zero engine noise it's a little hard to tell if this person does have an engine on the back of that parachute but of course this is flying at low altitude and these are the types of aircraft that become the most tricky to find and they are the types of aircraft that really worry Global Regulators when we start talking about long-range BV loss operations are fully autonomous BB loss operations because they are the most difficult ones to spot so this is where detect and avoid technology comes into play and so we'll start by

**[10:27]** kind of defining what detect and avoid technology is so the per for the purposes of this conversation because there are lots of different types of different definitions in different terms detect and avoid sense and avoid um obstacle avoidance but for the purposes of this presentation here we're going to talk about detect and avoid as a system that has the capability to detect both cooperative and non-cooperative aircraft and that aircraft is going to come that aircraft part is going to become important a little bit later on when we start to talking about detect and avoids types but the whole idea here is that we really want this technological solution that can spot these different types of aircraft um be able to report them back and with enough time to uh maintain um what's called well clear and avoid collisions um so there are multiple different types of detect and avoid that are out out there and they all have their benefits and drawbacks and as I go through the different types of detect and avoid over the course of this presentation I want everybody to

**[11:28]** realize for just really briefly none of these are a silver bullet they all layer into your overall strategic mitigation right like so we look at detect and avoid as really what's called a tactical mitigation in some ways you could think about it in terms of like a um I don't know a proximity sensor that something has gotten close enough to the aircraft or has encroached on the operational area where some type of risk mitigation or deconfliction needs to happen usually in avoidance maneuver right but this is just one overall piece and just having a detect and avoid system integrated into your con op is not going to be a guarantee of a video loss approval um there could be other pieces of the con op that could be limiting or disqualifying for BB loss operations so really something to bear in mind is that Regulators really try to look at your operation holistically they want to make sure that systems are integrated properly that they're functioning the way that they're described in whatever application you have and that you know that basically the overall safety

**[12:33]** picture um is good and detect and avoid can be a critical aspect of that and can be enabling for more types of advanced Beauty loss operations which we'll talk about in future slides so question is can I just use visual observers well Natasha already kind of touched on this in some of the introductions yeah you could uh but visual observers have some really obvious drawbacks right so I like this study from Vance at all um and um I believe that uh this is uh he's from Oklahoma State University this is a little bit old published in 2017 or so but there are a number of different studies out there that talk about the efficacy of visual observers and you know quite frankly visual observers are relatively limited um you know we humans have our imperfections right uh some more than others right right here um but um you know when we talk about visual observers basically the this study came to an interesting conclusion which was that visual observers were very very good at picking out or recognizing

**[13:34]** that there was an intruder aircraft in the area but where they really struggled was trying to determine the distance separation between that aircraft and the UAV so in other words if came really really hard for them to understand if an aircraft if an intruder aircraft really represented the threat and how much time that existed to deconflict uh the situation which becomes really problematic right now this study is relatively small um there was about I think 30 intercepts total and so um and a relatively small number of visual observers so I think the people in this I think it's probably safe to say and I'm extrapolating a little bit but the people in this study were well motivated to over perform right but humans you know generally speaking we're not perfect animals sometimes we're not standing in the right spot we can only see so much of the sky at once I wear contact lenses and I have terrible eyesight without them um you know and we're going to perform in varied States based

**[14:36]** off of you know where the retired distracted stressed out if we're ill um and of course you know it's difficult to scale if you have like a 75 kilometer long pipeline line that you're trying to inspect then placing a visual Observer or what every three kilometers or so becomes pretty burdensome pretty quickly so it's not really a good model to work with especially when there are technological solutions that can see much more of the sky much more quickly have predictable performance known margins of error that can be accounted for that can accurately show where an intruder is where it's heading and where it's been there's much more scalability there overall one other thing to consider too that's not caught on this slide is you know we did a deployment of one of our ground-based systems on top of a water tower in Texas I don't know how many of you folks are from North America are familiar with the weather in Texas but in the summer it gets well over 30 degrees Centigrade uh well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit um and you know on top of a big metal structure that absorbs a lot of heat you can

**[15:37]** imagine it gets really really hot up there and so try to stick a visual observer in a location like that for eight hours probably would end really poorly and you can imagine the inverse too if you're doing operations in a very very cold environment so weather could absolutely impact Human Performance and make it really dangerous potentially to have visual observers in certain locations to support the operation so trying to find a technological solution is definitely going to be helpful um so let's get into step back and let's talk about Cooperative systems really quickly so Cooperative systems are great and if you have an uncle if you have Cooperative systems into your con op then that is going to be a feather in your cap and I don't think anybody would say that you know having adsb receiver being able to display Cooperative traffic is going to hurt the safety case of your overall operation but the part of the problem that we're seeing and we'll talk about kind of the current regulatory state in a little bit and kind of where Cooperative detection systems fit more perfectly but if we're looking at you know doing um operations that

**[16:42]** you know fly relatively High uh flying over long distances then Cooperative detection is not going to be fully comprehensive and that's one of the challenges of it now it's really hard to get good data on the amount of non-cooperative flights and any one airspace at any one time it's really variable per country depending on different adsb mandates and nobody really has a good comprehensive spot I did find this one study which was published by a NASA scientist that calculated it's about 15 percent of flights and airspaces in the U.S that are non-cooperative but it really varies uh by country and even within the United States which is a huge country it can vary wildly depending on what part of the country you're in and I'm sure that there are places in the United States where non-cooperative traffic is closer to 50 percent uh particularly in rural locations where it might be old crop dusters that don't have the elect the electrical systems on board to support adsb systems so you

**[17:45]** can start to see here where the real need for detect and avoid technology for non-cooperative detection really lies um let's also talk about where these non-cooperative aircraft are flying well primarily visual flight rules right like so we one of the questions that I get asked a lot about is weather and what's the impact of weather on um you know architect and avoid system and in some ways weather's a bit of a red herring right like the let's call it Spate of spade here um that if you have a vision-based detective void system which we do um that it's not perfectly analogous to the human eye but you know if there is decreased visibility it is going to impact you know the performance of our system and the other types of detective void systems that we'll talk about in a little bit also have there are impacted in their own unique ways uh by weather as well but once we kind of cross that threshold into IFR uh where you know people are required to be in contact with uh air traffic control or be on radar with air traffic control or at least communicative we start seeing these non-cooperative traffic really drop off and you know it's also just not safe

**[18:48]** to fly with an older aircraft that doesn't have the electrical system to support um you know the instruments needed to do IFR effectively right so you know we're less worried about you know uh non-cooperative traffic and poor weather conditions but these are this traffic does tend to fly at lower altitudes definitely in classy on restricted airspace but really they could also be elsewhere uh because equipment fails sometimes right and you could have non-cooperative traffic within restricted airspace or an adsb mandated Zone either because somebody just forgot to flip on the transponder or because the transponder failed so mistakes happen um systems fail it's pretty rare but it does it could occur right so these are the types of aircraft we're worried about um and now let's get into the systems that are designed to detect them okay so we're going to focus on three primary types of detect and avoid uh for the purposes of the rest of this discussion so I'll talk a little bit I'll talk about Optical I'll talk about acoustic and I'll

**[19:50]** talk about radar um some systems that I'm not really going to discuss here are lidar RGB which is another type of vision technology or ultrasound and the reason why I'm not really going to talk about those is because um you know when we're talking about aircraft detection we really need to be talking about long detection ranges right um so you know if we think about you know some of the most powerful lidar systems that are out there right now that are able to go on Small uas they still have limited range they can't really see far enough out to deconflict the airspace in an effective way now lidar's advancing really rapidly and we may see that change in the next five to ten years but um you know certainly when it comes to RGB or ultrasound we're just knocking getting those ranges those are going to be really great systems for a static obstacle avoidance and you know fit under the broader bin or maybe sense and avoid but for our purposes we're going to really talk about these three different daa types because these are the ones that are going to be able to get you the detection ranges that you really need to be able to uh safely deconflict right

**[20:54]** so let's talk about um let's talk about the different deployment types too so there are different ways that we can think about this uh ground-based deployments on board detect and avoid and when you're thinking about what type of system works best for your con op well you got to think about which deployment method works so this is a drone in a box conference right so ground-based daa is basically where I think most people are going to be interested and the reasons why are really simple it preserves swap right there's no inter there there doesn't need to be an integration into the flight control system um you just need some type of visualization of the airspace um but there are some drawbacks to that right like so uh the advantage of drone in a box is that you can set up a system uh kind of set it and forget it um let it can be in an austere location could be completely off-grid um and then you're going to have your repeated operations and you can sanitize that level of airspace which is great but if you're starting to do something like pipeline inspections and you need to fly 75 kilometers then where you're going to have the same scalability issues that you would have with visual observers which is

**[21:54]** just you know how much infrastructure do you need to be able to support out um to be able to support these systems so something like a um you know when we're talking like a uh there are some longer range detection systems that are out there but even still you may need multiple systems to be able to support the full length of the operation in which case it may be better just to take an onboard diaa system and take that little sterilized bubble of airspace with you um of course a onboard systems have their own you know disadvantages uh you know swap obviously every system weighs every system has power draws some more than others um you have to integrate into the flight controller if you're using an open source autopilot that's great um and that means integration is probably relatively easy but not every autopilot's open source some are proprietary locked down some companies are more willing to work with third parties than others so there are all sorts of considerations um about whether or not you need an onboard or ground base but these are kind of the things that you need to kind of be factoring in in the back of your head especially if you're going to be putting this into a waiver right or or an application for BB

**[22:57]** loss you want to make sure that you have the right technology integrated into your con op in the right way so let's actually talk about the different types of detect and avoid Technologies out there and let's start with radar um and the reason why I want to start with radar is because I think it's pretty much the most well understood to Regulators I mean this is a technology that's been around in various forms for 85 years plus at this point um it's been around for a while um and its detection ranges can be massive I've got the detection range of um an onboard radar system um and it comes out to right about 3.5 kilometers two miles for those of us that those Americans out there that think of free Freedom Units um with a really good um you know field of regard um for a single panel um and you know the real advantage of this both important both is range it's night time it's gonna it it you know is able to operate in all weather um and with that because it's really well known that that kind of makes it a little bit easier to work with in some ways than other types of detect and avoid systems

**[24:01]** but there are some major cons here radar is expensive especially as you start scaling up the detection ranges right right it's going to have it's going to be challenged by particulates in the air so you know we're in Reno Nevada we get a lot of wildfire smoke over from California that blows in um and so in a smoky environment that's gonna that's gonna affect detection ranges low altitude clutter particularly at low uh detection ranges is going to you know impact performance curvature of the Earth for the really long detection ranges um you could certainly and there's a reason why the phrase flying under the radar exists right um so and if you have um you know an onboard system high swap high power requirements they're pretty heavy um public acceptance issues too right like it's kind of a joke but it's kind of not at the same time there are people out there during uh the height of the covet pandemic they thought that 5G Towers could cause covid right like and so if you're actively projecting a radar signal out into the world that can be difficult uh something that John touched on in the earlier presentation too uh is just

**[25:04]** additional regulatory approvals that are required for radar systems which can be really tough uh the FCC here in the United States will require you to get approval from them so there's an entirely separate approval process that you have to go through um just to get uh to utilize the radar particularly ground-based radar so these are all things that kind of factor in radar is really good though this isn't just me dunking on radar um but there it is really good it's really well known and there are certainly folks that have gotten multiple approvals out there using radar systems um but you know it has its advantages it has its disadvantages just like the systems we manufacture Optical systems right so our system is passive it doesn't require any additional approvals because we're not sending signals out into the world we have really good low altitude detections um really high Precision we're able to say okay that object that we're looking at is definitely a plane or definitely a helicopter or it's a bird it's a drone Etc um but our detection range isn't quite as good as radar we have a smaller field of view per camera we can you know certainly mitigate that by using more cameras uh but that

**[26:07]** adds more weight right um so and we talked about some of the challenges already with an optical system poor weather so poor visibility heavy precipitation is going to impact an optical system um and right now uh our Optical system is currently daylight only um we're working to fix that and we're actually hoping by end of year to be nighttime only and we've seen a tremendous interest from you know police departments that you know operate 24 7. um so this has become a really high priority for us but it is a daylight only system at the moment and so definitely consideration if your operations are 24 7 that you know an optical system is going to be challenged by that and even though we're lighter than a radar system we still wait right we still have we still draw Power it's not a ton of power it's not a ton of weight but it is still weight and I'll give an example here so the radar system that I talked about on the last page I think it's about 2.6 kilograms per panel I think you need four panels for uh 360 degree field of view our system is so that's

**[27:11]** already a lot of weight right there our system is 2.4 kilograms for uh five cameras plus the GPU module so it weighs less but you still need a pretty hefty bird to be able to carry that right um so um even though the power draws last even though it weighs less than a radar it still weighs quite a bit and it does take away and that does come at the expense of potentially other payload you need to carry so that's why ground-based systems exist right okay let's talk about acoustic and then let's get into the rakes part because I think that's why most what most people are interested in here right so an acoustic passive-based system so that this I didn't know before doing the research for this presentation but like ground-based acoustic systems can do detection pretty long range up to 10 kilometers away which is pretty incredible right um again all weather capable certainly functional at night uh but there are still some weather challenges right like it's snowing here in Boston where I live right now so you know that's going to mute sounds and probably impact detection ranges uh public sentence is going to be pretty good especially

**[28:13]** thanks to systems like shot spotter that are deployed all over the United States um and so people are generally used to this um and um pretty low price low power draw overall which is great the real con here is positional accuracy right so you may be able to determine that an aircraft is within 10 kilometers of you but pinpointing that exact location the aircraft is going to be much more difficult depending on the terrain features uh buildings uh the noise of the environment and of course it's going to be really hard to tell if the aircraft is coming in going out um and then of course when we talk about that paraglider that was on you know one of the early slides and that's going to be basically invisible to a system like this so again all of these systems have their pros and cons they've all been used in waivers they've all been got given BB loss approvals so they can work it just comes down to which one is going to work the best for your con op and if you can layer these mitigations together incorporate like an acoustic and an optical an optical and a radar then that's going to enhance your overall safety uh profile and help

**[29:16]** when you go for uh meetings with the regulator okay so we just did a big technological review right um now let's talk about considerations when you start going into BB loss approvals the big thing uh we at Iris are hearing right now is that well let me take a step back and talk about where the overall regulations are going at least in terms of the FAA so in the start of the New Year the FAA has started incorporating something called shielding into their waivers which basically means if you're within 50 feet of the ground or a structure then the FAA is going to give you credit for basically saying that that structure or the ground is probably more dangerous to another aircraft than the UAV will ever be which is a really smart move right um that makes a lot of sense and so the FAA has basically said okay if you're doing that and you have some type of detection system it could be non-cooperative could be cooperative but there needs to be some type of detect that a void system kind of uh you know built into it then they're going to allow for True BB loss flights um but that's not

**[30:22]** a lot of space to work with uh 50 Feet's really small and depending on the capabilities of the aircraft that could actually be potentially dangerous and we talk with lots of companies that want to fly higher and in fact some of the companies that we work with have gotten waivers to fly as high as you know a thousand feet AGL and are gradually going to incorporate that into a baby loss approval so uh for different flights uh for different con Ops you know that could be fine and which place go in which case go forth and um you know go do that mission but that 50 feet could be really restricting and limiting or dangerous for other types of operations so when you're thinking about incorporating a daa system well the point is to try to use that daa system to go beyond that 50 feet and we've seen some precedent with the FAA with customers uh using our technology to do that um and so basically what it all comes down to is the FAA um and other Regulators that we talked with Transport Canada Etc really want to understand that the system is going to work in a holistic sense

**[31:28]** and that you are going to have enough time to be able to execute a maneuver okay so this is a slide that I use in my presentation in my sales presentations to talk about okay well where are we going to place ground-based systems to provide enough coverage okay so the basic idea here is you always want to make sure that even if you're in the periphery of your operational area you always have that time budget um and that's going to be critical but the other part of this is that the FAA and other Regulators need you to prove it so you can go out and get an approval uh by just potentially doing math on paper but it's going to be relatively restricted until you can go out and do some data Gathering so they want to be able to test do you have the time at the periphery of your operation to mean to be able to execute that avoidance maneuver what is that avoidance maneuver is it just are you descending into that shielded environment um are you doing return to home um is it pilot initiated is it system initiated in

**[32:29]** other words fully autonomous so all of these things need to be proven out and clearly lineated for whatever regulator you want and depending on you know which regulator you're working with the methodology that they um follow to assess the operation that's going to give you the operational area you can work with and then you need to scale up the number of systems that you use either it's Optical acoustic radar to be able to support that operational environment but ultimately the big thing here is that you need to go out and do the testing um ahead of time so it doesn't need to be a ton of data it could be potentially like a month worth of testing it's kind of hard to say but you know the more engagement you have with your regulator probably the better certainly the folks at the FAA um do like to come out and see operations and validate for themselves that everything's working so it's not a bad idea to invite them out and give them the chance to really see the operation and just how risky uh the operation really is which usually isn't very much right like these are pretty low risk operations and we

**[33:33]** all want our operations to be safe so just kind of those considerations to bear in mind as you start seeking approvals so okay I think we touched on this a little bit can you get an approval with the daa system yeah can it be true BV loss yeah um and can you know you escape outside of that that shielding yeah we think we can um you know we're still doing more the work with the FAA shielding's relatively new um and but the signals that we're getting uh is that yes you can you can do this um and really the time is now to try to strike um the FAA is engaged Transport Canada is super engaged God Transport Canada are wonderful to work with um definitely the regulatory body that um I think we enjoy working with the most uh because they're so engaged they ask so many good questions and they they they're really willing to work with you but the FAA engagement has really taken off this year as well and of course the yasa is putting a renew a new focus on detect and avoid Technologies as as

**[34:37]** operators try to get out of segregated airspace so we're seeing this really good engagement um we're seeing approvals that incorporate true BV loss um and we're seeing detect and avoid as part of those approvals so now it's a really good time to do that uh to to start pursuing this but just bear in mind that you've got to show the system works holistically that it is safe and everything uh works together that you the in the way that you expect it to okay so I dropped a ton of information so thank you guys for listening in really appreciate all of your attentiveness through this and um you know of course you can reach out to me after this I'll be at the boot at the iris booth and of course you can have one-on-one but I think at this point um I think we're gonna open it up to questions here so uh Natasha I guess take it away yes yes you land for sharing these insights I'm sure it'll benefit the audience for people who are looking for baby loss waiver success thank you so much um right so uh we would like now like to open

**[35:41]** the house for a round of q a oh wow you've got so many questions um all right let's go with the first one pankajas is there any limitation on aircraft detection with the ground-based system in cases like swarming so I'm not sure exactly what you mean in terms of limitations uh for swarming so um if you mean that in terms of how many aircraft can be detected at a time which is what I think you're going with here uh at least in the in in with our system um we can detect up to uh 10 aircraft per camera our ground system has six cameras so theoretically we could detect UH 60 Intruders simultaneously um so I think that's what you're going for with that question um so in that case if you do have a swarm um of course you know that could mean any number of different drones um that could be in the airspace but we could detect theoretically up to 60

**[36:43]** of them simultaneously um and if they're close enough together we may end up detecting them in bunches as kind of like a unified detection but we can potentially do that um I can't speak as well to the other types of detection technology that are out there and how well they would be able to handle multiple detections with swarm but I think that's what you're going for with that question so I hope that answered it yeah yeah thanks Dan all right there's another one what is the uptime what happens when there is connectivity loss in the command center yeah this is a great question and this kind of goes back to more what the Strategic mitigation is um in that case so if you do have a loss of detect and avoid you do need to describe in your regulator in your application to whichever regulator you're working with what the mitigation is in that case and so if you're a like these systems cost right like they have um they can get rather expensive particularly with like the large ground-based radar systems we can get hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars for some of those massive systems so you know if you're able to

**[37:47]** incorporate multiple detect and avoid systems so that they're kind of covering and you've got some redundancy there that's great um that's not always possible in every instance so you do want to make sure that you describe what happens in those instances so if you do have that loss of connection does the system does the operation abort uh do you fly back under the return to home within shielding um so those things need to be worked out and so I would say um you know talk with um whatever regulator you know reach out to them and say hey this is what I think would be a proper mitigation in my particular conop uh to be able to get around this loss of detect and avoid is that going to be acceptable to you guys or do you want to see something else so work with them um if you're working with an outside consultant we offer regulatory Services if you're working with us we'll we'll help advise you on what might be a good strategy on those instances great thanks thanks man yeah so there's another one Brandon us have you made any progress in using the existing

**[38:47]** onboard sensors on something like an m300 to provide daa at over five pounds the modular system can eat up payload limitations pretty quickly on some industry standard drones and ground-based systems limit BB loss operational distance yeah I mean this is the trade-off right um when it comes to something like an m300 I mean so this is one of those you know integration issues so um you know we've flown on m300s that are adapted with open source autopilots and so we can absolutely do that there are a number of other aircraft that are out there uh that can support our multi-camera system which is much much heavier we also have a smaller single camera system um that comes in at about a pound 482 grams um so you know it all depends on kind of what works for the particular use case but yeah this is the trade-off and this is what's hard about it and you know one of the general challenges that people are facing is that there's no real detect and avoid mandate um in the Drone space so a lot of drone companies just have not integrated the tech and avoid uh as part of their manufacturing process and I can't I don't fault for

**[39:52]** them for that at all but it is a reality they're the number of companies that I can think of off the top of my head that sell you know a drone that weighs under 55 pounds 25 kilograms that has a detected avoid pre-integrated are pretty small um I can really think of like two off the top of my head um so there there really aren't that many it is a challenge it is hard um which is why like you kind of got to do these trade-offs right like so um I don't really have a great answer for this unfortunately um it all comes down to you know discussions with The Regulators how high you need to fly how much you can take advantage of it sounds like you might be American or Canadian but um you know how much you can take advantage of shielding um how much you can take advantage of infrastructure masking or um you know incorporate other types of Cooperative detection Technologies into the overall conop um to be able to kind of mitigate uh the swap implications for for an onboard detection system so yeah not a great answer but this is this is the challenge we're

**[40:54]** all trying to solve all right so there's another one how many waivers have been obtained using cashier G ooh good question so cassia G so uh in the United States we received two last March um or one in March one over the summer we received um one up in Canada um and then we actually just had a customer receive an approval uh just about a week or so ago with cassia G cassia Jane's a relatively new system it really got launched as a formal product in May of last year so we have a bunch of customers that are kind of in the initial r d uh process but we've had approvals in the United States and Canada we've have uh discussions that are ongoing so we have a customer that is really on the cusp of getting an approval right now I think we're waiting on signatures fingers crossed on that one for an FAA approval and we're working with a couple other customers in Canada for cassia G as well uh that are making their way through the sfoc process that are really kind of chugging along really nicely so um

**[41:58]** it's a handful right now it's enough to prove uh to do proof of concept so uh the first waiver that we got was with a single system we you know did a two systems of creating a corridor between the two um we got our first commercial approval which was true BV loss with um for a commercial customer doing inspections uh that just happened about about two weeks ago a week two weeks ago so really just happened um and then we have uh an approval that's kind of queued up on the uh Public Safety side uh we got our first sfoc Midway through last year up in Canada and then we've got uh two more queued up which I think are are going the right way based on our discussions with TC so it's kind of the state of where things are so we definitely have those approvals we've definitely shown that we can do it um and customers are starting to really ramp up all right let's just have one more question um right so vaishali asked how many daa systems are there

**[42:59]** and what okay that's a very hard question to answer um so um there aren't that many is what it comes down to because um you know there are you know we could talk about different types of radar systems I can think of three kind of commercially available actually Four um four four radar systems that are currently on the market that would be kind of priced uh more for commercial sales uh that are ground-based they are they're also onboard versions uh in the optical space there's really not a lot it's kind of us there's one other company that also kind of does onboard uh detect and avoid using optical sensors uh but they really kind of gear themselves more towards manned Aviation um so we're kind of inhibiting the same space but not quite we kind of have our own niches um and then on the acoustic space uh there's one really prolific company on the acoustic space and then there is uh another company that just developed their own acoustic system for their uh specifically for their own onboard usage

**[44:00]** um so there isn't really a lot there aren't a ton of detect and avoid options out there um and um certainly nowhere near as many detect and avoid options as there are um as there are um you know different drone manufacturers that are out there uh but there is some Choice there are systems available out there to help and there are a lot more Cooperative detection systems a lot more manufacturers of like mode s transponders form uh you know uh adsb receipts uh receivers so there there are a bunch of there are choices out there but there aren't a whole lot of them um at least not yet um we'll see how the market kind of develops as regulations develop and we'll see if there ends up being more competition in the space um as you know autonomous drone operations become more prolific globally right online all right thank you so much Dan to see the path forward to the adoption of BV loss operations would you would you

**[45:01]** like to share some closing thoughts no well thank you so much and thank you for to everybody that joined and for all the questions really really appreciate it I'm going to hop over to the iris Booth so feel free if you have some one-on-one questions to join me there um otherwise enjoy the rest of your show everybody for joining