Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome everybody to another episode of Weekly Wings, a dronelife.com podcast.
We have a informational episode. Joining me, as always, is Terry Neff. Terry, how you doing?
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Doing great. I'm doing great. We're missing Samuel, so it's a little different flow for the beginning of the episode, but I'm doing good. And I am gonna call you out on what you just did. You just artificially added a countdown timer at the beginning of the episode.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, I did it the last one too. I was like, we gotta record something and I'm gonna pretend like, you know, that was the soundboard. That wasn't me. Yeah, well, I mean, it's gonna be another. As always, as I always say, as always, great episode.
We'll be diving into drones used for public safety. We'll be looking at some battery stuff, autonomous helicopters, vets to drone event that is coming up in about a week. That will be in the Baltimore area at a very prominent baseball stadium. On a case study success side, we'll look at how drones are used in Australia to identify some koalas. And in the regulatory corner, ONRA is going to be coming up and a couple pieces with their latest kind of situation awareness DAA UTM technology solution that is getting those approvals from the FAA and going to allow operators to do some of the advanced beyond visual line of sight operations that everybody's looking to do. So I was just curious, Terry, what was the last thing that you put together, that you built.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: Put together and built. It's a knife and it is not a very good knife.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: You built it, you put it in. You put like.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: I made a knife. So I considered putting together.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: I mean, I. Yeah, I guess you like, you like, you like took the handle, made the handle. You, you.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: I cut it out, cut the sheet metal out. It's not a great knife, but it's.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: A start, you know, you a knife. So if you need, if anyone needs a knife, right, we got like Ruthless. Go to someone else. Are you gonna have like a.
Your own brand Ruthless knives or something like that?
[00:02:29] Speaker B: That'd be pretty cool.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Well, kicking things off just to. I thought why not start out on a really positive note here? And as I was going through, I saw that this, this came out, you know, just today, just before we were beginning this recording. A missing four year old found safe by a drone in under an hour in Millersville.
So child went missing.
You know, local, local authorities were contacted in order to notify them and you know, the, the agencies were immediately able to, you know, deploy this Drone to support the search and rescue and discovered the child near a creek.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: So I'm looking through this article, and I don't know if I'm just overlooking it or not, but, like, which department was responsible for, like, the drone part of things? Like, was it the volunteer firefighters or.
I'm assuming it would have to be them.
[00:03:44] Speaker A: Yeah, it looks like you had Robertson in Sumner county. So you had multiple counties coming together. You also had a volunteer fire department and the emergency management folks involved.
So, you know, one agency not having a drone. Possible. But when you get such a collection of folks together.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: And I just looked up Millersville, this is the sticks. So thank God they found the child quickly. That could have been very bad.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: And then what I was thinking is, like, when the child wanders off, so just shout out to the folks out there in the Millersville area in the Robertson and Sumner counties for having this technology. It doesn't say what drone they were using.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: We can only assume DJI possibly.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: But I was thinking to myself, this child could be missing. And so their family is, like, looking for them and concerned. And then meanwhile, the child's just, you know, playing down at the creek, walking further away, just being a kid. So as the. As the parent, the earlier you could recognize and detect because it's not like after an hour of your child missing, two, three, four hours of your child missing, you know, not that you haven't seen them in three hours. Right. And now they could still be bopping around, just wandering, just following a creek. And I'm like, oh, as I'm reading that story, it kind of like the kids just don't wander off thinking, I'm going to go get lost.
Something's drawing them in a certain.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Yeah, sorry, I don't mean to cut you off, but I'm still basically a kid. And I can remember back to when I lived in Asheville. Our house had a creek right across the street from us, and there's stones and stuff on the creek. I mean, I was. One time I went to the creek when I wasn't supposed to without letting anybody know. And I just kind of wandered off for like two hours. And when I got back, my mom was like, what?
I was this close to calling somebody. I knew you were doing something stupid. But it is. It is very easy to get lost at the creek, though. I scared myself a few times down there.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: And then when your kids do that regularly, you just kind of. You. You. That rope. Right. Because I did the same thing growing up in New England, visiting cousins in Vermont. You Know, we were out in the woods all the time for an hour, you know, and like, that was probably a long time. Come back, check in. But when that's the normal kind of thing that they're doing, all of a sudden something bad, some wander off, could happen quickly. So this technology is huge. And with that, as far as technology goes, next bit that we're going to cover here is looking at skydio.
And so this is a company that's raised hundreds of millions of dollars in their tech and they've, they've taken a lot of heat recently. They're, they're unable to, you know, source batteries due to, you know, sanctions with the batteries coming out of China and all this political back and forth in the drone space right now. But even with all this going on, it's like, what is the risk? So evaluating risks. And this article is coming out of TechCrunch and I think it's being looked at more of a, not a drone operator standpoint, but more of an investor standpoint. And so I think people are looking at this possible actual ban and they're like looking at skydio and they're like, yeah, if these DJI drones are banned, that is the go to. It doesn't matter what the price point is. It's. Anyone with that much money is going to buy that drone and it's kind of like gambling. And so right now at this point, to go out and get another $170 million on top of the hundreds of millions that they've already exact. Well, 230 during Series E. So they've already gone. Yeah, this isn't their first series of funding. This is like their fifth, you know, and I could be more than the fifth. I'm, you know, pre seed. There's all these, I'm not, there's no investment information coming out of this guy here.
But yeah, this is, this is an, this is an additional 170 to the 230 that they got last year. And they've raised money before that in other series of, of funding. And so you're looking at companies like a Japanese company. Hmm, interesting. So you think, oh, American company. And you have a huge amount of investment coming from Japan because they want to take this technology. As the article goes in.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: Creator of the Taser, Axon.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: Yeah, so Axon's huge Taser, American company making money hand over fist selling Tasers, you know, with huge margins.
But $60 million into Skydio, a Japanese company invests 60 million into Skydio.
So, and they want to put a thousand drones across Japan and help with LTE connectivity. So you go, oh, wait a second. So you're taking in 60 million from Japan and now you have some sort of obligation to this Japanese company. Well, what is that doing for America? So this is such muddy water. And what, what it says is last year they had over 100 million in annual revenue and 30% of that came from software. 38.1% gross margin in 2023. So their drones are 40 grand and they're making 40%. So they're, they're making $16,000 on a $40,000 drone.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: That's a pretty good profit margin.
So in terms of.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: But that's a combination of software and hardware. So their software margin is probably like 70% and their hardware margin is 15 or something like that.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: Maybe on a software costs a lot of money to develop, unfortunately.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: Yeah, well, driven by, well, driven by favorable mix shift towards software revenue. Yeah, but once the developer makes the software, you don't.
It doesn't cost you more to make more software.
I can distribute as much software as I want. Whereas every time you make a product, you have to physically buy more raw resources and it takes up all that extra commuting space. Whereas if I sell you access to the cloud software, I can just buy more server space.
But go ahead, you were going to say.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: So in terms of size of drone companies, we all know who the biggest is currently it's dji. Would you say that Skydio. I mean, I, I've never really paid attention to like the size of these companies. Like, is skydio the second biggest in terms of like consumer base? Would you say?
[00:11:39] Speaker A: No. So it says the article says right here, especially since it officially sunset its consumer drone product in 2023. Like, they don't make consumer product. They've come out and said, we don't make a consumer drone anymore.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Their cheapest drone is like 30 grand.
So there's literally no replacement.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: That's my bad.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: No, it's good. It's, it's, it. But see, that's an important point is there's no replacement for an Air 3, a Mini 4, an Avada. They, they don't mess around in that game. Things are also looking up for Skydio's military ambitions. Right.
Because 1.2 billion bookings in the pipeline. Over 50% was defest customers. So they're saying that they have 1.2 billion in like pre orders, with over 50% of that being from defense customers.
So you're selling something that you don't even have yet. You're taking investment on, don't even have the batteries.
But again, that's the whole risk thing. So at this point it just seems like they went out and they were able to.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: You know, get convinced. The people that mattered.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: Yep. And you know, they think that they could burn through only 238 million by 2029. But if you run some basic, you know, numbers, that's probably accurate. But if you think of having 700 employees, just do the math at home, you know, they're spending millions of dol every two weeks just on payroll, not even considering raw materials.
You know, manufacturing costs associated with the facilities, leases, all that insurance, all this stuff. Right. It's, it's a ton of money. So interesting to see, you know, what will happen here because here's a company that's telling you they can do it. They just need more market share and if more people would buy. But now they're, they're not producing a consumer product. So they just totally decimated their market share. It's awful. And you, so now you mentioned batteries, which I think is an important pivot into our next topic here, which is a dronelife.com article that came out just this week, points towards Lytton acquires Kuberg's facility to boost US lithium sulfur battery production for drone and defense application. So it's not just drones, it's all sorts of other ground robotics, water robotics, which, not really water robotics. Most of those are tethered, or I assume the majority are tethered. So not using batteries underwater.
You know, they, they're all getting their batteries from the same place. So again, it's looking at, hey, in a company, people get together. Investment, right? Investment in San Leandro facility aims to strengthen the domestic supply chain and deliver 200 milliwatt hour of high performance drone batteries. Like that's, you know, super interesting. Some, some companies saw this come out. Oh wow. Do you see that? This company over here that's getting, you know, millions of dollars in investment. They, they have nowhere to buy their batteries from. They have all this money, they need batteries. Huh? Boom. Opportunities. So company decides, hey, we're going to buy this, you know, US San Jose based facility and we're going to start manufacturing drone batteries.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: I'm a little confused at how they, like, I've never really researched batteries until I was in drones.
But when they say they produce 200 milliwatts of lithium, whatever per year is, are they like, I don't know how to formulate this question, but it's like, why are they.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: So that's 200 mega. I don't know if I. What is that? Megawatt hours?
If you're looking like, what is MWh.
I think that's megawatt hour.
[00:16:19] Speaker B: Megawatt hour.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: A megawatt hour, which is a thousand kilowatt hours. And when you start looking at kilowatt hours, like, batteries are milliamp hours. So megawatt is tens of thousands of kilowatts or a thousand kilowatts. And so milliwatts, batteries are measured in milliamp hours. So for people who operate in batteries, they would be able to basically take that megawatt, 200 megawatt number per year.
[00:16:55] Speaker B: A lot of batteries.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: And then. Yeah, and then you could think of like, okay, how many gallons is that in individually or. So it's a lot of batteries. That's a lot of small milliamp hour batteries. 5,000 milliamp hours is, I guess, how many.
A milliwatt to a.
Or a megawatt to a milliwatt converters.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: One megawatt of hour of electricity can power an average American home for 1.2 months. There you go. There's a quick fact. Thank you, Google AI.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: Oh, it's a lot like, it breaks it down into like, one E to the negative ninth. So there's a ton of megawatts or milliwatts in a megawatt.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: It can toast 89,000 slices of bread. Okay, that's a lot of this.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: It's a lot of drone batteries.
So we'll see where this goes, right? We'll see. Now the article, and they bring up the nd, the National Defense Authorization Act. And so people are putting their chips in, and there's chips over here, and there's chips over there. And you can buy the facility, but once you get the facility, then you gotta be able to make those.
This is pretty cool. Linton also recently announced that its battery cells were selected for testing aboard the International Space Station. See the overlap here?
But yeah. So it'll be interesting to see, not only can they produce the batteries, but can they ink and pen the deals with the manufacturers? And I'll tell you what, 170 million. Holy cow. Can you imagine one of these other drone manufacturers, like skydio's, valued, you know, their valuation over a billion dollars. They're. They're a unicorn company. And they just got 170 million. And it's kind of like, oh, okay, you know, we're gonna. We're gonna spend that in two years. And. And then there's other companies, these other US Manufacturers, like the next, the next ones up brink Teal. Just, just the ones that we see on the blue list, right. The ones that we've seen that have some of these contracts. It's like they haven't raised anywhere near 100 million. Some of them have gotten, you know, three figure, 100 million, things like that. Seven, seven figures, but nothing in the hundreds of millions. And they're like, oh my God. They're like, they're just thinking, gosh, if we just had 100 million, what could we do? Yeah, the numbers are astronomical because it even talks about in that battery article. They're going to invest 20 million in manufacturing. And yeah, it's exciting. I've just started to pop popcorn and just kind of enjoy watching all of the development happen as opposed to be like, oh, I need to see it go this way. It's like, who? Who cares? Either way there will be opportunities.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: America is going to have a boom for batteries and like silicon based stuff like chips. Like there are. We're already starting to produce our own. We don't produce anything basically compared to Taiwan, but we're starting to.
[00:20:30] Speaker A: It's a good step forward and we'll see what happens. Automation, if there's enough automation layered into the manufacturing, then we can do it here. But if it's heavy, if it's labor intensive, there's no way it can get done here. So I think a lot of the automation can be potentially baked into chip manufacturing. But we'll see, time will tell. There's pretty exciting things with the whole development of chips with Nvidia losing pretty much like a monopolistic approach over that market. There's quite a few couple other companies that are coming out with some pretty high speed stuff to drive the advanced AI computation crap that's happening everywhere. So talking about AI autonomous, that's just a great transition into the next article coming off dronelife.com and I don't remember if we talked about this, but I had a chance to interview man can't remember the gentleman his name in San Diego during Exponential it was talking about DARPA and Sikorsky working together in order to create, you know, flight software. And so this is pretty neat. This came out this past week. Autonomous Blackhawk helicopter demonstrates precise wildfire suppression. So Sikorsky and Rain partner to showcase. I'm like, was this Rain? What is it they're called Rain. Rain. So Sikorsky and Rain partnered to showcase rapid wildfire response with autonomous flight technology. So imagine that instead of like having A drone in a box ready to go. It's like we have a Blackhawk out on the flight line ready to go.
It just sit. Just sits out there.
And so recently they were able to do some, you know, test Discovery missions, autonomous flights with this Blackhawk, and demonstrate its ability to, you know, disperse fire, fire suppression, you know, water.
What do you think about that?
[00:22:57] Speaker B: I'm overwhelmed. I didn't know who Sikorsky is. Apparently it's just owned by Lockheed Martin. So it's just Lockheed Martin.
But this is a very niche subject to be getting into. Huh. There's a company that just develops software and products for already existing aircraft to put out wildfires. Like, who thought of that?
[00:23:24] Speaker A: Well, it's manual, right? So if you're doing a lot of this manually and you think it's going to say wildfires cost over 3. Holy. $390 billion annually. Wildfires cost the US 390 billion, not million billion annually. I saw some stuff about invasive species, and we don't even have that article on here, but it came out.
The United states is spending $400 million a year on combating invasive species across the United States. That's like one plant or, you know, material traveling into areas that it shouldn't, and when it does, it kills the other, you know, wildlife.
Millions, Hundreds of millions. And so how much money should be spent in order to mitigate the fire risk? Like if we can save $100 billion by spending 100 million or two, like $390 billion. Spend. Spend $50 billion if it saves us 100 billion. Because we're still coming out 50, you know, $50 billion. And if that means, you know, taking some of this technology because, say, a wildfire breaks out and you're the pilot, how do you know where to go? How do you know where to deploy water? How do you know where the most local source is for refilling your, you know, your water system? There's all these variables where you know how to fly and. But. But you're like, how can you automate that? So it's like, take the pilot out. You use the software to map everything. And now you're just programming the most.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: Efficient way to go about it.
Can I unleash a random fact on you since you were talking about invasive species?
[00:25:21] Speaker A: Yeah, go ahead.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: So back in the gold rush era, the Australians sold us a bunch of eucalyptus trees, and we planted them in California.
And it takes them a while to, like, develop and mature, but we're getting an increase in wildfires because eucalyptus oil is Very flammable when they mature.
That I could have some of the facts wrong about that, but that is something that happens. The Australians got us a long time ago.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: Huh. That's interesting.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: Random fact. It's just.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: Yeah, it's something you don't know until trees have matured and they're seeping oil.
[00:26:07] Speaker B: That is very flammable.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: And so you know this. I didn't even think about it. Like, here's some pretty neat photos showing the whole deployment. And it's no different than a drone going, picking something up from one location and delivering it to another location. And so they talk here about allowing observers to witness the capability. So collaborative efforts with observers on site. So representatives from key organizations including NASA, fema, darpa, Los Angeles County Fire, Orange County Fire attended the demonstration.
I. This isn't. I thought they were saying collaborative efforts like with observers. They were talking about observers, servers.
Autonomous Blackhawk or Fire Hawk helicopters. Could you imagine that?
[00:26:53] Speaker B: They're insane.
[00:26:55] Speaker A: They're calling it Firehawk. Like it's a Blackhawk, but if you, if you make it autonomous for, for combating fires, it's a Fire Hawk. Like, that's awesome. Whoever coined that with a little trademark.
Yeah. This is some really cool stuff.
[00:27:13] Speaker B: Are those photos, like of it in action with nobody in it?
[00:27:17] Speaker A: That's. No one in it. Yeah.
[00:27:19] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. That was, you know, it's nerve wracking the first time they sent that bad boy up. Like, please don't.
[00:27:26] Speaker A: Well, that's what I state. They've been flying this for a long time. Like we, I don't think we talked about it, but back in, I think it was March or April, whenever.
Maybe we're. I don't, I don't think maybe it wasn't going that far back, but they've been doing this like since, you know, 2023, 2022 maybe with DARPA. And they've integrated Rain's mission autonomy system. Right. With Sikorsky's matrix flight autonomy. So Sikorsky has all the software to make sure the drone. The drone, I guess it is the autonomous aircraft to fly and be safe and detect other aircraft. And what they've done is they've just taken that RAIN software and they've ported it in so that it knows again where to go. Where's the fire? And this is really cool.
[00:28:24] Speaker B: I'm glad the military industrial complex is being used for something good.
[00:28:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, man. And Sikorsky, dude, they're. Yeah, man. So they're. That is like the, like tip of the, the spear when it comes to aviation defense. Yeah.
Right there with the Boeing and Sikorsky and then in Connecticut. So growing up I in, in Connecticut was always familiar with the Sikorsky. It was even cooler is I had a chance to work on Blackhawks. So now it's pretty cool to see.
[00:29:03] Speaker B: This is coming full circle for you.
[00:29:06] Speaker A: Yeah. And then you don't have pilots. You know, the worst thing for the helicopters is the pilots. You know, everyone's breaking all the stuff so you kind of remove the pilot. You know, you think there's a little less maintenance. Just kidding. Pilots are awesome.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: You're gonna get some hate mail after this.
[00:29:25] Speaker A: A little hate mail from the. Yeah, from our huge.
[00:29:29] Speaker B: Our huge audience.
[00:29:30] Speaker A: Helicopter. Yeah, our helicopter. Fixed wing.
Kind of transitioning from a Blackhawk military aircraft. That scene into our next topic.
There's going to be an event on the 23rd. Third. So yeah, this is just less than a week from the time that you'll be listening to this.
This coming Saturday at Baltimore Oriole Stadium, Vets 2 Drones is hosting an event in partnership with drone responders and a few other agencies.
And so there's going to be free registration. So anyone who's either public safety or a US Military veteran, you can, you know, attend. You can show up to Camden Yards and from nine to one, kind of like a morning session is going to be for public safety personnel. And then between 12 noon and 4pm is going to be a time slot for those folks who are US Military veterans.
Again, there is no cost to attend and participate.
There's going to be looks like some lunch options provided during the event.
And do not bring your own drones. There are going to be drones on site. What they recommend is if you bring your own SD card, you can pop your SD card into any one of the drones that you end up flying and capture some photos and then you can take the SD card home with you. So for any public safety listeners or folks of the veteran community, take a look at this event. We'll have the link attached in the episode description.
[00:31:33] Speaker B: Yeah, what's there not to love here? You get to go play with drones for free. Yeah.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And then Camden Yard, just a beautiful stadium. I mean maybe not the best time of year.
[00:31:46] Speaker B: Is that a stadium?
[00:31:49] Speaker A: Yeah, it's Baltimore Orioles. So it's one of the most more well recognized baseball stadiums in the mlb. Just because of the age of the stadium and the history. There's this huge brick wall out in. Believe it's left, left field. I've been there, but it's been Many years. So it's just like a, on, on a summer night, on a fall night. You know, Camden Yards is just one of those baseball stadiums that's just basically a, you know, just that, that wonderful place to be and get yourself a hot dog and soda. Yeah.
And so koalas, Terry, what do you think? What do you think about koalas? And you also, you brought up how Australia got us earlier.
I didn't know. I didn't know that. I didn't know Australia had one up on us.
[00:32:48] Speaker B: But it's okay. They lost to Emus, so I mean, who has a better military?
[00:32:55] Speaker A: Yeah. And they also have that break dancer which I, I don't think is, that's.
[00:33:00] Speaker B: Pretty funny as well.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: Beating any. He's beating anybody.
[00:33:05] Speaker B: I love Australia. Australians are very nice.
[00:33:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Have you ever been to Australia?
[00:33:11] Speaker B: No, I've only met one Australian and he was the nicest human I've ever met.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: So he had a mole from the land down under.
[00:33:19] Speaker B: From the land down under.
[00:33:21] Speaker A: So we're going to Australia. Drones are detecting endangered koalas in Australia's Wallenbach Wildlife Sanctuary. So using thermal drones to produce surveys that confirm there is vital quality habitat, marking a conservation milestone. So pretty exciting to be able to put these drones up in I guess evening hours. Most likely using the thermal sensors in order to be able to spot the drones. But it also looks like this is a daytime, potentially daytime, hard to say.
[00:34:03] Speaker B: Could be shining photo. That is a weird photo. It looks like a daytime photo, top down.
[00:34:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
So it looks like they got a grant. See this is. These are those exciting things. These folks got a grant from the Mid Coast Council and with that grant they were able to purchase a drone and they ascertained the presence of three or of tree dwelling species across 4,000 hectare hector conservation area.
[00:34:39] Speaker B: So this is a wildlife sanctuary. So let's see, we don't really have these in the US So it's just a big plot of land and they just have animals just doing animal things on it. Is that what's.
[00:34:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I think we do. We have, we have sanctuaries. Like if you. Especially in Florida, I can think of like Wildlife National Park. I mean we call them national parks and you know, I feel like inside a lot of national parks what you'll find is that there are like these pockets of different conservation areas and sanctuaries.
[00:35:19] Speaker B: I feel a little dense now. We do have national parks. I never grew up around a crazy.
[00:35:25] Speaker A: Like, ah, we don't care about animals here. No, we just don't have like like, you're like, well, what's in the sanctuary over there? It's like, oh, buffalo. Wow. Who cares about buffalo, right? It's not like, yo, there's koalas in North Dakota. You're like, oh, we need to protect those koalas.
So I think a lot of it is, you know, overseas you're seeing some of these more, you know, just what you people might consider rare animals, you know, rhinoceroses, elephants. Right.
I don't think we have a lot of that naturally happening around here just because that's not their normal habitat, you know, like deep Detroit. Where are you from? Where.
Where the. Where the hyenas from Detroit. No, so.
[00:36:15] Speaker B: Well, this is cool. I'm glad they don't have to get. Oh, there it is. It mentioned it. Thank God they don't have to get close to these things. Stay far away from them. They're mean and they have chlamydia. So what?
Yes, dude. They're mean and they. Most of them have chlamydia, I do believe.
[00:36:33] Speaker A: Holy smokes. Is that in the article?
[00:36:35] Speaker B: It says it right there.
[00:36:38] Speaker A: What?
[00:36:39] Speaker B: I'm pointing out my screen like you can see it.
Let's see.
You have a different, like, zoom on your browser compared to me. Give me a second right here.
[00:36:55] Speaker A: Conjunctivitis. Is that what you're calling.
[00:37:00] Speaker B: Let's see. They had a full. In uniform coats of gray in bright white fur. No clouding or discharging eyes from conjunct. Conjunct, whatever that word is. And no standing on the rump from chlamydia.
[00:37:14] Speaker A: And no.
[00:37:16] Speaker B: A lot of them do have it, though. They do have.
They're disgusting, dude.
[00:37:21] Speaker A: Well, they're making. They're. They're making progress here. They're using the drones to figure out. They're checking up on them, who needs help. Yeah. Because if they. They can't help them. If they can't. Don't know what's wrong. And if they tried to go in on foot, Terry, they wouldn't be able to get a good view of the R. So, no, that's another good.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: I'm glad they're saying the rumps.
[00:37:40] Speaker A: And just another thing that I honest to God never thought I would ever be discussing on a podcast that has to do with drones is chlamydia. You know, So I think we're checking another. Another box koalas on koalas. Yes, absolutely. Just. Just checking boxes here. So great Uniform coats of grain, bright white fur. They're looking healthy. And if they weren't, then again, it's just, you know, here's that tool that can help them identify, you know, what the issue could be and how could they come up with a plan in order to address it, much like we do anywhere else. You know, you're using a drone public safety in order to assess a good or bad situation, sizing things up, assessing invasive species or even here, you know, what are we seeing here, Terry?
[00:38:36] Speaker B: That looks to be a dog guarding a robot dog guarding Marago down in Florida.
I knew we were going to talk about this when I seen it pop up a few weeks ago.
[00:38:51] Speaker A: But doesn't this make sense?
[00:38:53] Speaker B: It does. I mean, it's just one less person to go stand and look around and it's gonna have better visual than a person would. I mean, it has 360 cameras, I'm assuming.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's got GPS coordinates alerting automation built into it.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: Yeah, got it.
[00:39:13] Speaker A: It looks like it has a weapon on it, but it, I don't think that's got.
[00:39:19] Speaker B: That's, I think that's a micro boom.
[00:39:22] Speaker A: Arm, but it almost looks like.
[00:39:25] Speaker B: So he paid for this?
[00:39:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I had a ma. Why wouldn't you? I mean, you could probably. The price for one of these is like, I mean, to a normal person like you or I, it's like, oh my God, that's a lot of money. But companies are buying these things left and right. And from a security standpoint, the, the cost of a person who can only work eight hours a day.
And so you, so it's not like you're paying one person to do 24. 7 security. You have to pay three people to do it. And so it's, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a year for one person who's a decent security person. Because you can't, you can't pay the patrol person 50 grand. They're going to sell out. Right. So when you look at a security aspect, if someone's protecting something, you kind of want them to not be late on their mortgage payment. Because someone who's late on their mortgage payment is more likely anything, right. To turn their head or look away or be distracted. So this thing is a one time purchase, it's automated, you've, you've set the parameters and it goes back and charges. So even if you have two of them. Right.
[00:40:41] Speaker B: Well, it's just, I'm wondering because they had a lot of. We, we gave them flack about not having like drones in the area and stuff, like kind of scouting the, the event where he got shot at.
So is this the Secret Service? Beefing up or is this him, like forcing them to use it at his air, like in his property?
Like who's controlling these? Is it him and his like security he has or is it the Secret Service?
I don't think we know that information.
[00:41:16] Speaker A: I think it's Secret Service, to be honest.
It looks like it might have like something or. Yeah, usss, United States Secret Service.
[00:41:25] Speaker B: So, okay, so it's a Secret Service.
[00:41:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:28] Speaker B: And then here they're having nothing to having robot dogs.
[00:41:37] Speaker A: Well, I can. There's no way there wasn't already conversations. I mean, I'm sure there was people knocking on the door trying to sell them this stuff four years ago and they just didn't think it was necessary.
[00:41:49] Speaker B: And then doesn't have a do not pet sign on it. Sorry.
[00:41:52] Speaker A: Yeah, it says do not pet on it. On the arms right here. Do not pet. Do not pet. United States Secret Service. Tsd.
[00:42:04] Speaker B: That's a hard robot dog. That's probably the coolest looking one so far. Right? It's got the United States Secret Service on it.
[00:42:11] Speaker A: Well, it's crazy because I was just having been at the Elevate UAV conference, that spot was walking around. Anywhere you see a flying drone, you see the ground drone. We've talked about ASLAN robotics and how they're, you know, doing both ground robots in a doghouse and aerial robots on top of the building. So it just, it wouldn't be, you know, wouldn't surprise me if there was some sort of drone in a box being also put in to help combat the potential, you know, other threats. Because a ground robot, right, is great for getting down low and in the bushes where the guy was laying and stuff like that. But once you have that threat, how can you move quickly from one spot to another? The ground robot take a little bit more time. Can you imagine seeing one of these just like hauling, hauling ass?
[00:43:02] Speaker B: They're going to get there one day. They're going to get there one day. They're going to shoot beanbags and stuff. It's going to be terrible for.
[00:43:07] Speaker A: Oh like, dude, it'll run through a bush like that, that, that dog robot. Like if you try to pick it up, that thing is like, is like solid. So like, could you imagine it just does like a dart mode where it jumps and then it like pulls its legs in, it turns into like a torpedo and it literally just like blows a hole right through the bush and keeps, keeps going.
[00:43:30] Speaker B: That'd be great. I'm gonna, I'll be a volunteer if they want a human Subject to get hit by one.
[00:43:37] Speaker A: Yeah. Are you gonna, like, put the suit on?
[00:43:40] Speaker B: Can I have padding or something? You know?
[00:43:42] Speaker A: Yeah, I was gonna say, you know, they have the padding for their arm and legs. So the guy volunteers. All right, I'll get the hit. I don't know what you're gonna wear for spot. You can volunteer to be. Yeah, it'll be a rubber suit because it's gonna have, like, as soon as it can go grabs you, it's gonna hit you with, like, an electric shock.
Dude, I'm giving ideas here. Could you imagine that? It just, like, it tackles you and then it just like. Like it is the taser. Like, it just turns itself. It's a dog. It's a robotic dog taser.
[00:44:14] Speaker B: It should release and it should cover your face.
Just get like, real crazy.
[00:44:23] Speaker A: That is great. Well, we got a couple more. Excuse me.
Pieces will end here in the regulatory corner. Looking at a few, you know, approvals, acceptances coming out a little over a week ago on dronelife.com FA approval allows Onra Technologies Services to support BV loss waiver applications. So what the heck does that mean?
New FAA authorization supports the New York Power Authority's beyond visual line of sight drone mission. So, first of all, New York Power Authority, I just don't understand how you can have those two words in this. Like, we are the power authority. And you're like, wow, that's a lot. But then you realize when they say power, they're talking about, like, energy. So they're the authority of the energy. And still when you're talking about. When you're talking about, like, power and the stuff that goes to people's houses, it's like, why does it have to be authoritative?
But. But anyway, yeah, it just, like, comes off awful wrong. Yeah, you're immediately like, I don't want to buy anything from them.
So what is this right? The FAA has granted a letter of acceptance to ONRA to deploy its strategic drone conflict detection and conformance monitoring services.
So onra, what they provide is the mission manager platform, and that ties in all the local airspace, local air traffic ads, B, remote id, like, everything you need to be aware of what's going on around the drone is what ONRA provides. So onras put up sensors, onras set up software. Onra's connected all the different pieces. And so a company that wants to fly beyond visual on a site can simply purchase, you know, access to their airspace solution.
And what's important is the FAA approved. The FAA has granted a letter of acceptance to unravel. Basically saying unra, your software, your hardware, your technology for detect and avoid conflict, drone conflict detection is, meets the standard. And so when they go to a customer, they're not just making up crap like oh yeah, our soft, our solution works. No, they can take this letter of acceptance to the New York Power Authority and say, hey, look, if you do your drone operations using our mission manager platform, you will be able to fly beyond visual line of sight.
[00:47:34] Speaker B: I didn't know who ONRA was until now.
I am looking at their website right now.
So Arlington of that one company up in Syracuse, the Hidden Level. Hidden level, there you go.
[00:47:51] Speaker A: And so ONRA works with Arlington police Department mana drone delivery.
And they're basically a solutions provider to say, hey, you have hardware, you have certified pilots, you can use our solution in order to make sure that you don't fly into anything.
[00:48:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:14] Speaker A: And with that Loa Onra serves as a UAS service supplier under the FAA's near term approval process. And this is how you can expedite operators like the power authority to get beyond visual on site flights.
So it should be pretty interesting to see, you know, how this is going to help set the standards for, you know, future beyond visual line of sight operations.
And so on the same note, matternet partners with ONRA in order to collaborate for scaling urban drone delivery networks. Because again, if you're going to be doing inspections, you don't want to hit any aircraft. Well, if you're going to be doing urban drone delivery, don't you need the same technology?
[00:49:05] Speaker B: Well, they got their hands in a lot of pies right now.
[00:49:09] Speaker A: Well, when you get that type of approval, right. When you get that letter of acceptance now it now it takes your idea, your concept right from phase, maybe into phase.
Let's go. We actually have the approval.
[00:49:30] Speaker B: So when you mentioned.
[00:49:32] Speaker A: Yeah, when you have an idea, people, people who are educated aren't necessarily going to work with you when you have the approval. Permission, like you said, when you have permission, man, people are, you know, they're not waiting on anything. You actually have something that you can sell. So it makes sense that once this letter of acceptance came out, all of a sudden they started getting folks to buy in and commit to, you know, some sort of contractual operational agreements, scale drone delivery networks while maintaining the higher safety standards for beyond visual on site operations in shared airspace.
[00:50:17] Speaker B: It's a great step forward for both companies. Matter nets, the, we talked about them not too long ago. They're the company that has like the demogorgon looking drone tower thing. They have, yeah.
[00:50:30] Speaker A: And Matternet is. Has primarily worked closely with UPS in the past. And it looks like Marinette's also launched. I don't know. Yeah, we played this video. I'm pretty sure it's because it has the.
[00:50:49] Speaker B: When I say Demogorgon, it's like a flower tower thing where you can. Like the restaurant.
[00:50:54] Speaker A: Yes, yes. The pod. Yes. I think it might be in this photo. Yes. This was the article.
They worked with UPS in the past, but now they might be doing their own stuff, so looks promising.
[00:51:11] Speaker B: And then onra.
[00:51:13] Speaker A: Hey, the thing is, is it's like when you're on run, you're providing the daa. It doesn't matter what operator is flying. They all need the same solution. So that's kind of where, you know, how do you create? How do you create or get involved with the piece of the pie that everyone needs, no matter where you fly. And that's what anra's gotten involved with. So there are some other folks out there providing the same thing. And it'll be interesting because it's all region based. Right. If you don't have sensors and equipment in that region, you're never going to have customers.
So the larger that these service solution providers can build, their networks, their regions, the more customers you're going to have. So I think we're going to see like a dozen, two dozen, you know, pop up.
But then there's probably going to be a point in time where, you know, one acquires another. You start to see like it's going.
[00:52:14] Speaker B: To be an arms race until one gets big enough to start buying mergers.
[00:52:19] Speaker A: You know, in order to create. Because it's like, hey, if we merge, then we can raise more money in order to move in and compete with the other companies instead of trying to compete with each other. So that'll be interesting to see how that goes.
And we've talked about dexa, we talked about Drone Express before. Remember Drone Express, Winston Salem, so.
[00:52:48] Speaker B: Oh, Winston's. I remember something about Winsome Salem.
[00:52:50] Speaker A: So DEXA Drone Express expands drone delivery with a new FA BV loss waiver. So FA waiver allows DEXA to extend drone delivery reach and efficiency.
And so what this is, It's a part 107 beyond visual line sight waiver, but it's not, it's using vos.
So instead of having to have a lot of pilots out there, they are able to leverage visual observers in order to go beyond the visual line of sight of the pilot themselves.
[00:53:26] Speaker B: Oh, okay.
[00:53:28] Speaker A: Yeah. So there's no technology, there's no, like ONRA being layered into this, it just means less pilots and only visual observers, which is seen, which is pretty much the standard in the industry right now. As far as like what, what's available. Having more pilots is always more beneficial because it increases your ability to keep things going. So what's interesting though is that they're posting more. And so being that Winston Salem is kind of close, I'm. I'm just waiting. You see this, you see these announcements, but you know, at what point am I going to be able to actually just go out to Winston Salem and see this happening?
Yeah, and so it's only available on like Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
[00:54:19] Speaker B: Let's say it's a start. I mean, it's a fairly new company.
[00:54:27] Speaker A: And Yeah, I don't know, I think it says it's so close Friday to Sunday, 12 to 5. Well, it's 4:00 and it's Friday to Sunday and still closed. So this is one that I'm watching closely just because of how local it is because usually you can't pay attention to stuff like you can see the articles, but being able to see it in sight because it's, you know, you're getting half the story, you're getting the best, you know, parts when it comes to some, you know, news pieces, especially when it comes to more like a press release. Hey, we just got this approval. All right, well, you got the approval, you got the waiver, but how are you applying that in the real world versus just making a post or, you know, sharing about it? So, man, that was a informational filled episode there. What do you think, Terry?
[00:55:26] Speaker B: Thought we had some fun, talked about random stuff, didn't go too off topic. Sometimes we do that.
[00:55:31] Speaker A: What, koalas with chlamydia? Is that your favorite part or, or the, the Fire Hawk?
[00:55:36] Speaker B: I don't know. The, the Fire Hawk was. It's pretty cool. I mean, it's just rad, you know, like I'm a man, I like stuff like that. You know, Fire Hawk, a Blackhawk that puts out fires. Come on now.
[00:55:48] Speaker A: Yeah, an autonomous neuron, like a helicopter is just so cool. And then have it be autonomous and it's fighting fire. It's.
It's pretty awesome. It would be really cool to see the control station that the pilots are on their website. Was it up there?
[00:56:04] Speaker B: It did have it on their website because I remember looking at it, I was like, that's crazy looking.
[00:56:10] Speaker A: We'll have to. The DARPA website bring it back up at some point. But it's like, you know, these on the ground flight decks. I'm sure it's a lot like a, you know, Reaper Predator things, things like that, but with that mission screen for the, for the firefighting aspect of it also, also playing a role.
A lot of the things that we talked about I think too are a couple of the things, the battery stuff and then onra's solutions for the near term approval process with beyond visual line of sight. Those are the types of things where it's going to be really exciting to just sit back and you know, onra's facilitation of BV loss should happen more quickly. We're seeing it, you know, right now. And then this battery news about this purchase of a battery plant that's going to put, put out 200 megawatt hour of batteries in total batteries per year. It's, it's really interesting because again, ideas are easy, execution is everything. So you can raise $20 million based on the possibility that you know, the demand goes up and the revenue gets to this certain point and that's all great, but then to actually execute, put everything in place, make the batteries and see the market demand increase, man, that'll be.
If they can do it and everything falls into place, then they're deserving of whatever, you know, you know, revenue, compensation, profit that they make. And, and it's, and it will help the, the entire industry. But yeah, that'll be really exciting if you're a veteran, if you're public safety personnel, you're in the Maryland area, check out Vets2Drones website, check out the drone responders website, check out the link in the description of the podcast and get out to Camden Yards on November 23rd for some networking and drone flying. Really appreciate everybody's. And if you need a knife, don't forget Terry does not build knives. So call someone else. Fantastic. Well, as always Terry, I appreciate your time, your attention and thank you what you've added to the episode and to all of our listeners and thank you for your time and attention. We hope you found value in this week's episode and we will see you next week. Fly safe.
