# Introducing the Future of Aerial Autonomy

- Event: NestGen ’25
- Published: March 7, 2025
- Length: 32:25
- Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/dq1ie9sHSJo/

> 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 where we about to take our drone operations to a whole new altitude I'm shrii your pilot for the next half an hour and I promise a smoooth flight into this insightful session today's session is a special one why you ask we're here to introduce two FlytBase offerings ready to change your autonomous drone operations let me build a suspense a bit more before we dig in I have a few housekeeping rules to help us make the session a smooth experience for all of us have questions drop them in Q&A box anytime we'll tackle them at the end end of the session this session is recorded So if you miss anything you can always revisit it later join the conversation on social using # nesin on LinkedIn and Twitter to share insights and tag our speakers also a huge thanks to our nesin 25 sponsors the ones who leading the way and the industry forward now

**[1:25]** let us Dive Right In I'm thrilled to introduce our speaker for the day jel Kar who is the business development manager at FlytBase and is here to launch the flight Bas Pro and air with all of us whether you're managing a handful of drones or a fleet flight based Pro gives you the controlled reliability and you can say goodbye to the manual hles and hello to streamline one to many drone operations and not to forget we have the flight based air AKA aerial intelligence for wordss which is the AI upgrade for any drone operations in any industry and any vertical but more to come from Kel Kel the stage is yours thank you thank you so much shti uh thank you for the nice warm introduction and yeah I'm very excited for the session uh for everyone who is dialing in uh we have quite an exciting session because we're going to talk a little bit about um how

**[2:29]** 2024 has been we're going to talk about uh how 2025 is shaping up these first two months what the future of aial autonomy is looking like and how flight Bas is uh enabling Enterprises to jump onto the bandwagon of docs and the AI hyp train so we're going to break it down step by step talk about a few challenges that large Enterprises are facing and then uh map those problems with uh interesting Solutions so with that I'll just share my screen and I'll get started with our session for today I hope my screen is visible uh awesome so uh thank you for the introduction shti uh as I mentioned we're going to jump into uh what the future of aial autonomy is going to look like and of course we're going to talk about flight based Pro flight based air but before that I would like to do a quick recap of 2024 um me and my team we personally work with a lot of large Enterprises is across the globe and

**[3:31]** the theme of 2024 has been uh the deployments of docks across all geographies for different use cases so every day we wake up you know we woke up in 2024 we found new partners new customers deploying dogs for really a really diverse range of use cases so this is from birth scaring to security to mapping construction monitoring you name it and it has been very exciting to see compared to 2023 how rapidly this adoption has been uh uh took place in 2024 and uh in that entire Journey one thing that was constant was learning so there was a big learning curve for a lot of our partners a lot for us as well so we were listening we had tapped into we have a you know wide distributor network via which we get constant feedback and one of those uh uh you know primary feedback was end to-end workflows how do we extract the most uh value out of these docks that are

**[4:37]** deployed across the globe with end to-end workflow so how do we uh do if T based workflows how do we solve for different challenges that enterprises have and that's where uh 2024 ended and 2025 started and what a year it has been so far uh there the entire buzz word or the buzz has been around AI it's around agentic FL it's around how um AI is seeping into all the different industries that we see around us so from productivity sales marketing uh biosciences to also aial autonomy and uh what we've been doing at FlytBase constantly is we've been uh pioneering the use of AI and that's what 2025 looks like for us but before we jump into what the future will hold what 2025 will look like uh it is important to go back to the basics so let's talk about wave theory for a bit uh wave theory is a theory that we established based on

**[5:39]** our years of working in the doc business for deploying docs for large Enterprises so we have four waves wave zero Wave 1 wave two and wave three as you can see wave zero is where most customers start that those are the proof of concept they're still demoing the dock they're still setting up uh the dock for their uh use cases wave one is when they make the first purchase now this is the most critical sort of stage because they're doing a very uh the first wave is where customers are really skeptical of how the return on investment will look like uh what are the different use cases that they can Target and therefore this stage when successful leads to a single Set Side deployment now here is when we start talking about loss compliance it security compliance um because the dock is now being integrated into the Enterprise Network of the customer uh the heads are

**[6:40]** turning so the IT department will knock on the operator's door hey what are you guys doing you need my approval the regulatory bodies will come in and say hey what are you guys doing you need a compliance uh certificate so wave two takes a while typically it takes 6 months uh what we've noticed from the 6th to the 12th month phase is but once this roadblock or I would say this stage is crossed that's where we talk about scale that's where now the customers identified use cases they've got all the permissions in place they have a green light from their management and that's when they start talking about three setes four setes five setes and uh that's where where wave three comes in and here now it becomes a complex Fleet Management task Team Management task uh it becomes a complex data orchestration uh problem that we we need to solve so solve for so uh what how we'll structure this entire session is we'll first talk about um based on the waves that we experience with customers

**[7:40]** we've identified four core problems that customers have faced in their entire Journey from wave zero to wave three so the uh four problems that we've primarily identified that are holding customers back from you know probably going to wave two or wave three and it really depends on a Case toase basis some customers face these problems at wave zero itself others probably face it at wave two wave three but the four core problems uh and I'll touch upon them briefly here first is data security and it compliance um a big header in itself uh these docks are being integrated into into the network of Enterprises so a lot of uh customers are requiring a green light from their it departments and uh these are not like drones so drones you have an RC and the Drone itself which is completely dependent until unless you integrate it into uh the network but because you have an SD card setup you can always do a data transfer and then work on the downstream data independently but with docs that's not

**[8:42]** the case second problem that we uh identified is docs have been now been deployed wave one is successful what next how do I realize the return on investment I already use pix4d or SD how do I use the data that I'm collecting in the Upstream with the software or the platforms that I'm using in the downstream that's where Enterprise Integrations comes into play Third is around cumbersome Mission planning so this is primarily coming into picture when we talking about asset inspections uh pipeline inspections so industrial use cases um you have 2D Mission 3D Mission but what more how can we improve the user experience to plan much complex missions in tight spaces the fourth is um lack of intelligence and that's where 2025 ties in is how do we make sense of the data that we're collecting how do we integrate AI into the workforce to reduce the dependency on manual intervention for remote operations so

**[9:42]** let's dive into the first challenge we take it step by step and I will double click on each of the problems so the first problem is data security and it compliance uh as I mentioned because of you know major uh hurdles that it departments are setting in for good reason given that the doc needs to integrate with the network uh the first problem that a lot of customers are facing are the is the scaling issues purchases of docs are dependent on these it security uh checks the second is the nature of these approvals in itself so they're quite complex there are a lot of documentation there's a lot of documentation that needs to go into the application there are a lot of tests that customers or their it teams are doing so it's quite a complex scenario uh to navigate the third is uh data access so here we talk about uh authorization uh here we talk about data residency so who's authorized to use my

**[10:44]** data where is my data going uh who has access to my data and the third is uh where is my data being stored uh and wave the fourth point is where wave one and wave two deployments are being delayed so that's primarily for customers in wave zero where it requirement or challenges are the first roadblock uh to doing anything even procuring the first dock becomes a challenge uh with FlytBase we've been very um aware of this issue we've been doing this for the last 10 years now so we understand the nature of requirements that customers have and one of the uh lowest hanging sort of fruits to get these approvals in place are the certifications and compliance uh reports so the first is ISO 2701 which we have we have sock2 type 2 and gdpr for European deployment so these are all certification that we have with are cloud-based deployments so when you talk about FlytBase Enterprise when you talk about flight Bas zero any subscription of FlytBase uh which is deployed on cloud we have these

**[11:47]** three certifications along with detailed VAP reports that uh we we provide to customers so typically during wave zero these documents suffice where they come in the the it teams go through these documents and in 90 95% of the cases we good to go with wave zero deployments that's not the case for wave two and wave three uh wave zero to wave 1 you're good to go but wave two wave three the Nuance comes in when uh we are integrating with so wave zero Wave 1 typically customers use guest networks they use uh certain carved out networks for from the Enterprise wave two wave three is when we start integrating with the network of the Enterprise so firewall protection secure allow lists what domains does FlytBase hit what what are the fully qualified domain names uh they need to White Label white list AP

**[12:50]** IPS uh on their end to pass that firewall third is real-time traffic monitoring so where is the doc communicating now the nature of the dock itself the DJI doc uh the country of origin is China so there are a lot of large Enterprises who face that issue of uh they need realtime stats on where is the doc communicating that really helps allay the concerns of most teams and uh the fourth item is is there a method of blocking unwanted coms from the get-go so what has happened is in 2023 20 early 2024 a lot of customers uh when they started identifying the communication pattern of docks they realized that the dock is a very chattery system it Chatters a lot it loves to talk to random IPS which it has nothing to do with and uh that's where we understood the need of coming up with flight based Shield we we noticed that this is not very it doesn't build confidence

**[13:52]** when the dog wants to communicate to the entire world so the best is to sandbox the dock uh using an external firewall and blocking all unwanted IPS and allowing only the flight based domains um so if this is all technical to you please feel free to you know ask me questions I'll more than happy to explain this but the best way to explain this is via a video so we are jumping into the flight based dashboard in the air section uh which is when you connect an air device to FlytBase you can jump right into the diagnostic section and here there are two panels one is the maintenance panel and is the other is The Shield so I will jump right into the shield section this is a very interesting view so if you are a Enterprise customer currently stuck in wave zero Wave 1 and your it teams need confidence this is what you show them this is what you pull up on the flight based dashboard here you see exactly number of the number of total number of events that an external firewall is

**[14:57]** blocking uh that flight Bas is set up with the shield initiative the destinations to which the doc was trying to communicate to uh and the IPS have been blocked or the events have been blocked and also the allowed domains which are all flight based own domains so these are the domains that your it team will be interested in your it team will also be interested in analyzing patterns as to where the doc is trying to communicate and whether or not the unwanted coms have been blocked so this is a very uh you know has been been a very helpful confidence building exercise with large Enterprises so it solves for all the four problems that you know we spoke of in the previous slide so I'll just quickly jump here the external firewall blocks all coms we allow only flight based domains there is a real-time traffic monitoring uh of your uh of all the comps that are happening and there is an automated server blocking all these unwanted comps so moving on let's

**[16:03]** dive into the Second Challenge I briefly touched upon this one other another challenge that we observed is okay you got a green light from it now we're in Wave 1 operators are comfortable flying the Drone they're comfortable with remote operations you have a waiver in the process now how do I justify all of this upfront cost that I've made in the hardware in the pilot training to my management uh the best way is is to maximize the full potential of the dock by targeting multiple use cases so a lot of our customers I'll talk about a customer in Australia they have a Greenery they're using it to scare birds uh but then how do I also use this DOC for site security uh or how do I also use this dog to map uh map the entire site and maybe do some sort of construction monitor most of these drone most of the Drone solution providers Enterprises they have a mature drone practice so they're either using drone deploy they're using pix 4D for mapping they're using genetic or milestone for security uh they're using

**[17:10]** uh you know a daa system for flight safety so by integrating all of the Upstream collected data with these platforms you are able customers are then able to expand their scope of imagination and they're able to Target different use cases and with FlytBase we help document all these uh into a very you know robust Roi calculation and we able to help them justify those costs and the easiest way to do that is with the help of fling so the way we integrate with different platforms top three which most customers used in 2024 and continue to do that in 2025 is first the alarm Flink integrating with alarm sources to do an if T based workflow if this then that if an if an intruder alarm is uh triggered fly the Drone to the location this can be either automated or manual depending on your regulatory landscape the fourth is the video streaming Flink live streaming the uh gimbal or the payload information

**[18:10]** into a milestone or a genetic and the third is for mapping use cases uh you know integrating with pix 4D drone deploy stros depending on your use case and your preferred software these are all the fling partners that we signed in 2024 and it's been overwhelming we see quite a lot of big names jumping onto this model of us the platform initiative that we are taking and depending on your on the customers preferred platform they can integrate it with FlytBase and expand the scope of the use case so I'll just quickly play a couple of videos the first is the genech Flink so here you can see that the gench EXP the gene system the video management system has all the video feeds from different drones in real time so for a security operator they get an eye in the sky they get an additional uh data point when they're doing security op so Emer think emergency response Think Public Safety think industrial security uh this

**[19:12]** Flink really helps you know realize that Roi as I mentioned the next is um pix 40 so this is a long video where most of us know you know you can plan a mission on FlytBase you can execute the Drone the Drone will fly do a grid grid pattern Mission collect all of the data and once that data is collected you can quickly go to the gallery section and Export all of the media uh which goes into the export manager so once you go to the export manager you have all of the data exported and ready to go and once the data is ready to export you can share it with any flick so if you have both EZ and pix 4D for different setups then you can share it with either e or pix 4D and this entire initiative is also being automated all right so this is uh a really powerful tool for uh construction monitoring mapping related use cases uh GIS use cases

**[20:18]** Etc so this is the output from our site and you can take these overlays export them and use them in other platforms you can also in the future import them into flight base so that was the second Challenge and one thing that I will come upon and I'll touch upon flight based Pro and FlytBase air one item that I missed is flight Bas Pro allows customers to integrate with flinks which is which is really really powerful so moving on in the interest of time um I will get on to the third and the fourth challenge the third challenge is Mission planning so now we're jumping into asset inspection and as I mentioned you can do 2D Mission planning but what about the altitude data um you know relative to the takeoff point or relative to the ground you need a more nuanced approach 3D Mission planning is great but most Pilots are comfortable with actually flying the Drone and recording the waypoints so you can do that with uh We've introduced a new feature which is a 5D machine planner so at in FlytBase you can actually uh fly the Drone remotely and record Mission

**[21:21]** record waypoints to plan a machine how that helps is it not only captures the Drone location and altitude those are the two Dimension it also captures the pitch tilt and zoom so the PTC data points as well this helps plan really nuanced missions around very complex infrastructure so if you have substations power lines if you have multiple trees on site if you have a lot of heavy machinery moving around you can actually do these missions and plan you know plan missions and then set corridors accordingly the fourth challenge which brings us to air which is one of my really uh favorite topics is the lack of intelligence we understand that docs help us collect data and remote helps us with the live streaming but how about uh you know that that leads to excessive human intervention right it leads to the delayed response time so how about adding a layer of intelligence to dogs and that's where we released FlytBase air earlier this year in fact just three weeks back where

**[22:25]** air connects with your doc and gives you um detection object detection in real time it also provides data security and other items please feel free to get in touch with me you know we can give you a live demo uh oneon-one but the main the chunk of the use case is actually doing detection of vehicles objects and future uh classes in real time so all of this is happening in real time and because air is deployed close to the dock it directly connects with the dock it's an edge device of sorts these models are very close to the dock itself so it's not an onboard computer which is doing detection in real time rather it's a compute device which streams the takes the video directly from the dock and gives you uh detection overlays in real time so why I mentioned that is because there is a lot of vertical scalability that is available with with FlytBase air as opposed to having AI on board a computer

**[23:28]** computer which is on a drone so onboard computers have limited scalability whereas an actual CPU unit which is weather hardened gives you much more uh much more uh scalability so one more item here is um we aren't just detecting we're also recording and notifying so upon detection we are also if the operator is not in front of the screen there is a sound alert that comes up and also in the back end the a unit is actually recording the video for evidentiary purposes so here you can see that the video is recorded and it is logged in the flight lck section right uh so we have these two classes already and uh yeah before I jump into different kind of models which I think people will find interesting is the vertical aspect that I was mentioning we have an Nvidia GPU in the air device it's a edge device which connects with the dock it has one TB of local storage this is an HDD

**[24:29]** and 512gb of sdd SSD sorry um so you can have local data storage so data residency is covered further you have expansion slot so you can add U ssds or of up to 20 TB 30 TB depending on what you can Source from the market it is fully ruggedized so if you're doing remote operations uh I was just earlier speaking to sensor based in Australia so they're using one of these devices where they're deploying it at Plus 45° C and -5° C so it's fully rided it has four RJ45 Port so in the future we you will have the ability to in uh connect with external devices as I mentioned the operating temperature ranges from -20° C to plus 60° C which is a which is uh which will cover you for most deployments it has a three-year warranty as well so with air we are giving um quite a lot of flexibility when it comes to Vertical scaling we also also have a model of bring your own model

**[25:31]** so we will uh promote or create an entire Community where folks can plug their own models based on the data that they've trained on in using air and then use so think cattle cattle detection think animal detection Etc we have a system integrator program around this as well wherein uh uh doc solution providers can onboard as air partners and they can create unique Solutions using the air itself now all of these challenges so challenge Number Four challenge number one which was data security and detection is being covered by air the issue again one more item was the scalability and that's where we came up with flight based Pro we have flight based zero which is a $0 subscription we have flight based Enterprise which is uh more suited for large Enterprises but for medium small to medium users who want to just get started we we've come up with flight based Pro so with flight based Pro you CH solve the first challenge Enterprise grade data security you get

**[26:36]** Enterprise Integrations with flinks you get 5D Mission planning and you get realtime AI by integrating an air unit so the pro is a all-in-one solution from a pricing Point standpoint flight based Pro is not a per do subscription it's a per organization subscription so we are charging $1,000 or $999 per year per organ organization so even if you have one dog or if you have 10 dogs you just need to pay $1,000 a year and then you get uh you get build based on your usage so you get 5,000 video viewer minutes up front those are the live streaming minutes and then you get 2,000 minutes every month now that gives you the flexibility because you can start small scale at your own pace and expand when you're ready we have FlytBase usage calculator so you we can actually estimate what kind of a usage you will have on Pro and we can help you uh plan your next steps on expansion um with

**[27:37]** with the help of our sales and solution engineering team as well so you get the flexibility you get a pay youo model companies can start small and they can scale at their own pace so with flight based Pro we always like to say are you ready to get set pro right uh so that was my time thank you so much for Patiently listening at I'm more than happy if you know if you have any questions please feel free to drop them uh shy I didn't get a chance to okay I I can see a few questions is air included in FlytBase Pro no so air is a separate unit uh in itself the air unit um is an additional it's an add-on we charge for the actual Hardware with the hardware you get the software package package bundled in as well so FlytBase is not included in pro pro is because not everyone will need an air whereas Pro is something that that every

**[28:38]** doc user can get started with so essentially you can uh procure the air separately and more than happy to you know connect with you to discuss more specifics second question is how will the FlytBase air add value to my doc operations considering doc 3 is said to have its oh that's a great question so I actually covered this licitly so with Doc 3 the the detection will happen with an onboard computer with the m4d or m4d uh within with an onboard computer you have the ability to do you know basic detection you human detection vehicle detection you can also probably plug in a few of your own models but there's not a lot of vertical scalability think think futuristic think future proofing your deployment if you want to do a large language model deployment if you want to do text based Pro hey uh you know like one question that I get all the time or we have an internal test which is really cool please detect a red car is there a red car in the scene if you

**[29:39]** see any ambulance on scene please notify me these kind of text based prompts to do real-time detection is something that we have on our road map and now envisioning that with an onboard computer uh is very difficult because there is a limitation to the amount of compute you get whereas an edge computer comp where you when you separate these two instances when you have an edge computer you can very uh easily scale your model locally uh so that takes the second question what level of customization is available in Flight Bas Pro that's a that's a good question as well happy to take that up separately uh with a demo but in general you can integrate alarm flings you can integrate live streaming flings you can integrate uh with your mapping Solutions you can also uh play around with the live streaming minute so you can do custom bundles you can also uh you have storage addons so we can integrate with your local storage so there are quite a lot of customizations overall FlytBase is very

**[30:42]** modular so you're able to play around and uh come up with different kind of uh solutions for yourself and we have a lot of drone solution providers in the industry who work with us uvt sensor uh folks across the globe who are creating their own you know solution stack with FlytBase Pro so you can get in touch with them and uh we we' be more than happy to connect you with them and you know you can see what they have to offer so I think those are all questions and we've we're just one minute over if there is any last question or any other thought um you know happy to take that up Shy anything that you would like to add I think we pretty much done so we don't see any questions but we are more than available today any more questions you can visit us on our webite and you will be able to fill in the form and we'll be getting back to you soon I'm yeah sorry I'm just typing in my email ID as well so if anyone wants to directly reach out please feel free to do that we can share more content we can share this presentation deck as well on it yeah thank you uh thanks Kos that was an amazing

**[31:47]** session and I hope it was insightful as well for stay back for the session uh we'll be stopping it here but then we always available on K has provided his email ID but on our website as well and we look forward to see more enquires from your side thank you so much and yeah byebye thank you I'll just plug nean thank you Nan for this this it's an amazing platform please head on to the next session yes let's keep this uh moving thank you so much guys goodbye