# Enhanced Surveillance, Safety and Security with Sunflower Labs - Event: NestGen ’24 - Published: March 18, 2024 - Length: 32:15 - Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/XoFK7mmg1JE/ > 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 Alex from Sunflower Labs for an insightful session on autonomous security solutions. Learn how Sunflower Labs' Beehive system enhances property security with integrated drones. Explore their intuitive software and real-world deployments in automotive factories, stadiums, and more. With FAA approvals and global deployments, Sunflower Labs offers reliable security strategies. Discover the benefits of their solutions for patrols, inspections, and interventions. Whether you're in security or tech, this session provides valuable insights into optimizing security strategies with Sunflower Labs. To know more, visit: ===== Subscribe to FlytBase YouTube - Follow Us On - LinkedIn - Facebook - Twitter - Instagram - ## Transcript **[0:20]** okay hey everyone and welcome to another engaging session and ntion 24 I'm Natasha product designer at FlytBase and I'm delighted to welcome you to this session I hope you're enjoying Nan so far please let us know in the chat and do share your feedback at the Nan wall of love so in this session we're going to Deep dive deep into how you can optimize your security solution with sunflower labs they build and sell remote autonomous Security Solutions for commercial industrial Agricultural and Residential Properties the sunflower beehive system is a unique drone in a box solution built to be fully autonomous from the ground up this system integrates with their existing security cameras and sensors and extends the capability of any security system or staff so trust me guys they're the reason we can sleep a little more soundly at night so worry not to show you the way we have Alex founder and CEO of sunflower Labs joining us today Alex is a specialist in emerging trends of **[1:24]** autonomous Robotics and security Technologies he brings Decades of experience in building unique products leveraging Cutting Edge Technologies and trust me they've got a solid security solution that would make any spy movie jealous just kidding but before I let Alex take the stage I'd like to share a few housekeeping rules so you can please type in your questions in the Q&A tab of the session and it'll be answered at the end of the presentation this session is getting recorded so it'll be published soon and also we have a sunflower Labs booth in the Expo section so please make sure you visit it during the networking and Booth slots and finally if you find this session insightful then please share it on LinkedIn using the hashtag NJ so before we move on I just want to thank DJI our title sponsor and S Labs our go sponsor so thank you so much for supporting us in this Mission so with that over to you Alex thank you **[2:25]** Natasha um thank you everyone uh for joining today excited to tell you what we're doing and um to give you some uh some updates on where we are so um let me first tell you just a little bit about uh what we do as a company and then I'll talk about more more generally about what we do in terms of security so sunflower Labs build an autonomous drone security system so uh all of these words are really important to us so we want to build a system which is fully autonomous uh yes we do require that there is a pilot and command at least for the time being but the system is built uh to be uh technically capable of operating without anybody attending to it as soon as the regulations allow us to do that um it is a security solution so our primary focus is property security outdoor property security to be specific and of course the Drone because we want to be able to cover a large property very quickly with all of the advantages that the Drone provides to you so **[3:29]** it's made for uh patrolling securing and inspecting large outdoor properties our system consists of three components first is the Drone that we call the be um it is a unique design is custom designed by us the unique aspect about our drone from almost everything else that you will see in the market is that our drone first and foremost is built for Reliable Landing so a lot of people who design drones design them for flying um that's fine F drones should be flying but we actually don't think that flying is the primary goal of the Drone our primary goal is to come back and to land our secondary goal is to automatically recharge so our drone is built for landing and integrated recharging and our tertiary goal is actually to uh fly and then we have other goals after that so the the drone's unique shape is built to be a counter to the base station The Hive so what you see in the middle that's our base station which will house the Drone and that will recharge the **[4:30]** Drone and generally will you know make sure that it can land even in very rough weather conditions and the third component is our software so our software is uh uniquely designed by us as well it is truly built to be the simplest way to operate a drone you can imagine so if you've seen um other drone controls usually they're very powerful usually they can do a lot of things because we are so narrowly focused on security we're able to hide or remove or just generally automate so many so much of our functionality making our software really there's like like 12 buttons that you can push in the entire software um and that makes it so that our operators people who use our system have a really easy time learning how to use it and an easy time operating the system so I wanted to show you a little bit of our software so in this video you will see how our system uh operates so this is essentially what you would see is the main screen this example here is going to show you our office so **[5:32]** that's actually our office right here uh we Geo uh cage and we map the property for obstacles uh you can select uh what you want to control or what you want to inspect in this case this is a short inspection and this is how the system works it just opens up from the box it takes off when under 5 seconds from when it was asked to be deployed it goes to a location that was told to inspect whether manually or based on a trigger it will Det detect people and vehicles it can follow people around it can send you alerts and um it will capture everything throughout the flight uh all the pictures all the video all of the sensor data and then in the end it will come back it will find its base station it will slide in when it touches those golden rings those that's the charging system it will land and it'll be ready to go again and then this is a video you can find on our website it's just a loop of whole bunch of different customers that have deployed our system so in this case one of our partners is security Central in North Carolina and so here you can see a different **[6:33]** property where they're operating the system also geoc caged also map for obstacles these are the different patrols that they automatically perform so they can just pick whichever Patrol they needed deploy it and there you go same thing again within seconds it's up in the air and it's flying so uh I wouldn't show much more of this video but I did want to show a different one I talked about our system being uh rapidly Deployable so here is a little bit of a of a different view so this is actually Four cameras three looking at the base station and one recording from the Drone flying over our office and flying uh automatically to a random location so this video is actually 12 hours long so I'm not going to play the whole thing today um but um if you'd like to see the whole video let me know but this is just a couple of selected clips of the Drone performing I think it was 100 0 flights that the system did in those 12 hours so this is kind of goes as an example of how our system **[7:36]** is built to be to be uh reliable so reliable for Landings even in bad weather conditions to be repeatable we can be deployed within seconds every couple of minutes if necessary and to be very rapid so rapid is reliable repeatable and Rapid is sort of the three key words for anything that you will be providing for security so those would be the essentials so here just this is just kind of looping over and over as the Drone takes off s and lands six off and lands goes to different location comes back recharges gets ready to go again so so that's uh that was just a little bit about kind of uh our system uh but just to speak a little bit more generally you know why did we pick security and and why are we sort of doing that so I I am a strong believer that drones can really be good at one thing so it can be they can be extremely good at one thing they can be okay at two or three things and they can be like particularly like sort of mediocre at 15 different things and it really depends which thing you pick so if what you're building is a drone for delivery then you can be really good at delivery but you're **[8:40]** probably not particularly good drone for security or for inspections for example if you're good for I don't know um uh inspections there could be sort of other things other payloads other specialization that you will pick we wanted to build a system that's truly good for security and so to that end we needed the system to be easy to be uh to to deploy easy to use we needed to replace or reduce the number of security guards you would have on a property we need it to be very rapid we need it to be affordable and extremely reliable and so if you look at some of the points on the slide really all of current security is humans and cameras that's basically modern security so you can install a bunch of cameras you can have security guards yeah you can also have sensors and maybe a couple of other things but pretty much like most of the security will be observations in some case some some interaction or call or a person who's going to call the police well um that tends to be first of all quite expensive and quite limiting in what you can do so you can only install so many **[9:40]** cameras practically before it becomes like unmanageable so let's say you have a large property okay you can have a couple dozen cameras or something like that to cover them but those cameras aren't going to cover everything and those cameras are going to be typically installed at locations which are less than optimal for where you would want to absor Reserve right so the camera is typically mounted on the building that they're trying to protect looking outwards but really what you want is the camera on the perimeter looking inward but if you do that then you just look like a prison right with like a fence of camera staring at you so it's sound like a super great solution um human uh security guards uh you know are very effective but very expensive and somewhat unreliable so you can hire quite a bit of guards and whether they are paying attention or not you know you don't quite know so so you could be spending a lot lot of money but not necessarily getting the best of your security uh so we wanted to address that we wanted to basically build a system that is a replacement for a large network of security cameras instead of having uh dozens **[10:44]** or not some cases hundreds of security cameras you can have a few and then you can have our system to complement the rest of it and instead of having many security guard again you can have a few you can have them remotely and have the system be able to go to the areas which aren't necessarily covered by the stationary cameras do a patrol of the property get a closer look and then a drone can also provide a form of intervention right so if a drone flies out to follow you on the property and you should not be there that's quite an intimidating experience you know equivalent to security guard with a flashlight or or a dog that starts barking at you or something like that so um so that's the the reasoning sort of behind our system and as the way that we understand the market is sort of shaped today so this is the the making security better and cheaper sort of approach now there are many advantages of the Drone um I don't need to convince folks here that drones are useful I'm sure but just to give you a few so a drone can be deployed within seconds and so that's really one of the biggest advantages in in an our system is it's built to just be a **[11:46]** trigger goes off it arms self diagnosis opens the roof and it's out of the door in under five seconds and we can actually make it even shorter um we can cover a large area so uh we have a deployment that uh covers about 200 Acres with one system and so it takes a little while maybe to get to the the outer corners of it but with one system you can cover quite quite large areas I have another slide um that shows that um we're not uh we're not going to be stopped by Gates or fences so a lot of people sort of look into um uh groundbased Rovers or or the the the dogs the robotic dogs and so forth you know those can't really go much further than the human can right a drone can fly over a much larger area without being obstructed by anything um we can do patrols much more frequently than people like I said we can do patrols every few minutes imagine hiring a security guard and telling him he has to do a patrol of a property every two minutes or every five minutes that would not be possible um through uh computer vision we can detect just about anything so uh people in vehicles is the most important thing but we're working on uh some much **[12:48]** more advanced detections and we'll talk about that in the future uh and we can do it on a regular schedule we can do it on a randomized schedule so you can't predict when the Drone takes off and where it goes the is just kind of randomly operating in different places um and so on so some of the other things I've already mentioned in these slides um and our system is built for a variety of use cases so we have our systems deployed at some Automotive factories so large big spaces that need to be covered uh quite extensively we have our systems deployed uh over train depots or train uh storage facilities um we have our systems over our office Parks uh done some Stadium installations we do a whole bunch of self storage facilities so uh those are typically remote and uh on man so there's nobody sort to attend to them except for the Drone we do some correctional facilities and even some uh religious buildings uh which need uh more and more security um uh lately especially and some uh some unique aspects to our system uh I'll go through these **[13:53]** somewhat quickly so one fast installation so you've seen lots of drones in the boxes and you've seen thect pies of the cranes which are loading them right uh that's not the case with our system it's 35 kilg so 75 78 pounds two people can easily carry it flop it down somewhere uh the only thing that you need is uh Open Sky uh you need standard power 110 or 220 and you need a connection to the internet and here you can do Ethernet or LTE 5G or even starlink so it's very easy to deploy we've actually done installations in under two hours uh all in uh so uh yeah so the the the basee station is just 35 kilos the Drone is 1 and a 12 kilos so you can put it in the back of your back of your van or back of your SUV bring it somewhere plop it out set it up ready to go really really quickly so I think that's one of the really unique aspects to us um we make we make great software uh we make it I I swear I think this is the easiest way that anybody has F on a drone particularly because you don't really fly it the thing is autonomous you're really only just **[14:56]** suggesting to it what you wanted to do and what you needed to observe and it just does everything it wants uh you know it needs you to do it handles emergencies it handles weather changing weather conditions it handles uh if it detected air traffic or or if there's airspace restrictions so nearly everything that the system can everything it can be automated is automated in the system and it works on um on on a regular web browser it works on an iPad works on any phone uh and basically these are the screenshots from from our software just real screenshots of our software flying over our office I didn't have to do any for pH shop or anything um it's built to be reliable and safe so this is our primary um design goal right the system needs to be extremely reliable because if you're going to use it for security and you're can to use it hundreds of times day or you know uh that's that that's possible then it needs to be extremely reliable so it's built for fully autonomous operations yes currently there is a pilot in command who is remotely watching the system when the Drone flies but eventually we hope to get away **[15:59]** from that as well um it is uh it does all of the automatic pre-checks uh self checks before the flight actually doesn't continuously it does checks before the flight during the flight and after the flight and if any anomalies are detected the Drone will react to it uh it is built for all weather um so yes some there are some extreme weather conditions in which we will not fly we will fly in pretty strong winds we'll fly in Fairly heavy rains but there are obviously limits Beyond which we will not recommend that you operate the system system not that people haven't but uh you know that's probably not a super good idea but generally we believe that with time we can handle even very extreme weather conditions uh so we think that autonomous drones should be able to do that and it's built for automatic return landing and recharging so it's a full cycle of operations like I said we monitor a traffic uh we we deal with uh automated deconfliction and um uh and we've done 177,000 flights with 99.9% reliability so super proud of that uh I oh yeah I mentioned I'll talk about um uh coverage so um the three concentric **[17:05]** circles that you see on the picture show you all of the different uh areas you can reach within one two or three minutes of operations uh of flight basically so uh by the way the thing the little box there on the left that is a football stadium for 18,000 people just to give you a sense of scale as a matter of fact there's like 12 or there's seven or eight football fields uh in that picture just so you understand sort of the size of it and so if you're willing to wait uh for 3 minutes to get to a corner of the uh of the location then uh we can cover up to 250 acres and so that's three minutes to get there hang out there for a little bit come back and land after that uh and then a couple of other interesting bits so we integrate with all the typical security systems think of us as just a camera so you might have other cameras already the picture you see on the top right is a ubiquity and so um one of them is just our drone and so if you have a Monitoring Center monitoring other cameras already you can just see the video from the Drone automatically in there um **[18:10]** we provide proactive deterrence so we can scare somebody away from the property we can follow them around and we will do automatic live privacy protection so if you look at that picture you see everything that's blurry uh on the outside that is outside of our property so in real time we will blur out anything that's not part of your property so in case your neighbors don't want you protecting them or spying on them right you can show them the footage and say in real time on the video on um uh in images will will blur out everything that is not supposed to be covered by by your property um and um we do like I said we do air traffic monitoring so we can see if there are aircraft for from adsb and from mlad from OG which is the open glider Network that's used in Europe and from flarm so we will will automatically aggregate all of that information and react to all of that so we don't need to wait for for any of the UTM to become available we basically decided to just solve this problem for ourselves the way that the best that we can um and uh last thing I'll mention is **[19:15]** uh we have all sorts of approvals so from various FAA part 107 waivers for Beyond visual line of sight for uh for visual Observer um waivers uh also waivers um from oper over people over Vehicles we actually have another waiver for some kind of a visibility requirement as well so that's for us in Europe we have done a number of different soras so Sora is the specific operational risk assessment that is the way that you get the approvals in Europe and the one uh the best one that we have right now is a sale 2 sale 2 is a specific assurance and integrity level um and that allows us to essentially do the type of security that that we do over the properties where we operate that gives us night operation uh uh authorization that gives us uh we don't have need to have a visual Observer we can fly over populated areas although not densely populated but sort of lightly populated areas and in some cases we can even fly in restricted airspace such as airports this picture behind me is **[20:15]** real that's our base uh base station that is the operational uh like a police of the airport that is a real flight that's a Southwest flight and that's our draw on the air much closer not on the the plane is further on the runway but uh this is the uh this is the grr airport in uh Grand Rapids Michigan where we had authorization to basically Patrol some of the areas and outskirts of the airport while the planes were coming in landing and taking off uh yes that sounds crazy but uh we were able to show that our system is safe and reliable even for things like that um our systems are installed in about 10 different countries right now uh happy to install them in more get in touch if you have a country that we haven't covered or city and um yeah so that's that's the end of my presentation uh so that's uh some of our team there's about three times more folks than that um and that's some more systems in the snow so uh that's all I wanted to share about our system if you have questions **[21:19]** I'm happy to answer them and I can also play some other videos and show how our system works in various other situations let's let's see do we have any questions okay yeah thanks Alex for sharing these insights I'm sure it'll benefit our audience in the security sector so yeah said uh let's head over to the Q&A section now so you can uh audience you can just go to the Q&A Tab and ask away yeah um is the is Sunflower lab supporting customers updating waivers for B VI loss yes absolutely um so we basically have a framework for everything that we need to get uh approval for and whenever there is a new site that needs to be considered we will review it we will take the documents that we have previously gotten approval on uh if we need any customizations provide the customizations and then you can submit them if you're the operat yourself we can submit them on your behalf uh so a **[22:21]** number of different ways that we can do that can the video feed be shared with a video management system already in place yes also uh we will provide an rtsp video stream and any VMS that you might be using that supports rtsp will be able to inject the stream so uh when the Drone is not flying it's just broadcasting our logo um and then as soon as the Drone takes off it becomes it becomes a stream so what's actually kind of cool is that the VMS systems typically record when there's motion so then they don't record when the Drone is not flying and as soon as the Drone takes off they see motion and they start Auto automatically recording uh we of course record the video as well but um but you can do that yourself as well um here do I do I approve these um or oh you're approving them okay um can there be an integration okay with security considered sorry they're like **[23:21]** jumping around so I can't see okay uh is there an RGB and infrared cameras yes so there's there's now both both so um actual I guess the other the other one is the thermal camera so the RGB camera is our primary payload so it is a low light sensitive camera that also sees a near infrared light but there is also now a thermal secondary camera so here you could see a video the the outside is our regular RGB camera and the inner box is the thermal overlay so the thermal cameras are typically narrower they're they're lower resolution they're narrow field of view so we thought that the best solution is really this synchronized overlay and you can turn it on and off as you as you see fit okay um does sunflower Labs Dock and drone solution provide some drone hopping option from one dock to another dock um not yet so we will likely provide that in the future uh we don't currently hop from one dock to another um but that is **[24:26]** something that that we're interested in the reason we don't do it is actually kind of silly it's because of encryption because we essentially have a pointto point encryption between our base station and the Drone and so shifting that encryption to another uh base station is a lot of work so we haven't done that yet but uh that is something we do want to do in the near future okay what else what daa solution has been integrated to enable BV loss in US operations uh so it's in us it's only adsb adsb in and it's the 978 and the 1090 and so uh we receive both of those um automatically and we react to them as well so the way that we do that is we have uh an area that we monitor for adsb so we just sort of filter everything that's far away we have an area where we would warn you that something could be approaching you so think of these as sort of cylinders in space so there is a cylinder that is I don't know two miles wide and um you know half a mile tall and we will warn you and then we have like an emergency area so if **[25:30]** there's something which is in the emergency area you really should not be flying and then the system will automatically react that if the if an airplane or a helicopter is approaching an emergency area we will return the Drone to the base station actually without we will inform you but you have no choice the Drone will be returning the base station automatically okay um uh how much battery life and the range so our battery is alog together is about 20 minutes of flight um so we don't have the biggest battery in the world and we don't actually like charge it to 100% the reason for that there's actually a couple of reasons one most of our operations if you look at how our use the Drone most of the flights are under five minutes so what people are much more interested in are rapid flights and Rapid recharging rather than long flights so we don't do like a city Patrol we're patrolling typically a building or a factory or something like that so uh by using um by optimizing toward um a faster recharging so we sort of **[26:32]** lose a little bit of of flight time as a result of that but we ultimately can give you a flight every few minutes which I think is also quite a unique approach so if you have a drone and I know there's drones that fly for 45 50 minutes but then they take four or five hours to recharge right because those batteries cannot be rapidly recharged so if you wanted to rapidly recharge and be ready on standby uh and also have the battery last a really long time because when we do these smaller Cycles we had to optimize for a slightly um smaller battery range battery size and which range we can cover so roughly one square kilometer per system is what we are targeted for that is less to do with battery that is more to do with the radio so the the radio is a 0to point radio link and so um you know if we exceed that uh in the future we will switch to LTE or something but for the time being about 500 meters maybe 600 meters radius is what we cover so that gives you about a square kilometer can you carry a speaker and the flood light we can't carry a speaker because to make **[27:33]** a to put a speaker on that is loud enough it needs to be pretty large and the Drone needs to be quite large otherwise the speaker is not loud enough to overcome the propellers um we do have in the future um uh that we're going to have a payload with headlights and so those will be really bright lights that you will be able to flash somebody with we don't have it today but we're experimenting with it and we are considering putting in like a siren so it wouldn't be a speaker it will be like um like a horn so you can make a loud noise but you couldn't like talk down to a person is that a 360 degree camera underneath no there is only one camera and that's in the nose uh of the Drone so I'll switch to the slide here so that little uh nose of the Drone is the one camera the dots the the dots all around those are collision avoidance sensors so they're are four and they are covering 360° and they're ultrasound collision avoidance sensors because we might flying sideways or backwards depending where we need to go and then there's a camera underneath and that camera **[28:33]** is for landing only so that camera looks for our Landing beacon on our base station and that's how it lands uh if you wanted to do a 360 uh view you just yaw slowly and you have a nice 360 degree view we actually do have that as a feature um excellent job Alex thank you very much just some questions uas oh wait I read this one so that was the IR and um and the RGB camera stuff uh hopping daa did I answer them all [Music] um some of these are redundant so I'm not answering every one of them transfering so how does it transfer so um the same radio link between the Drone and the base station so we would uh we would stream a video in um sort of a slightly **[29:35]** reduce quality as we're flying live but then we also have an SD card on the Drone and then uh any snapshots or anything else that goes onto the SD card can then be downloaded um you know in a Spare Time typically it all happens more or less in real time because the radio link for us is enough to be able to to deploy everything to the customer uh and the video is with 250 Mill seconds of latency uh and then the snapshots could be like a few seconds but typically real time uh are you hiring people and partnering with companies to help extend us sure get so on our website there's a jobs page or just reach out and let us know um all right I think we're out of time I don't know if I missed any they sort of jumped around a bit but um oh do we have sunflower sensors no we don't currently have the sunflower sensors yes that was the original idea um but the sunflower sensors were meant for kind of a private residential use case most of our **[30:36]** deployments right now are commercial so instead of deploying our own sensors we integrate with uh variety of sensors which are currently available on the market okay I think that's my time yeah so thanks Alex um thank you so much would you like to share any closing thoughts oh boy I don't know what did I say what didn't I say already um uh well uh I think Focus right so if you're building drones if you're building a solution uh stay focused it's really easy for to let your imagination run to be able to you always feel like you can do more things I think one thing that we are quite unique for is that you know we've probably turned down more customers than we have just because we have folks coming to us with things that we're just not suitable for uh I know it sounds like we can do it but you know at the end of the day like we're very good at this specific thing and when we deploy that the customers are happy our team **[31:37]** is focused we're we're delivering results but if you try to do too many things you know you don't quite get them all right so that's my my closing thought yeah thank you so much right so just before we close um I just wanted to tell everybody that we've launched the NestGen Community which is an exclusive invite only Community for all the Drone autonomy andth yes so please find the form in the chat window and you can join the wait list so yeah I think we're done thanks everybody for joining us today hope you're having a great time at nesg we still have a few upcoming sessions so please go to the sessions Tab and stay tuned see you there bye-bye thanks Alex bye