Drones in the Wild
By: Lakin Vitton
Tags: Autonomous Vehicles, Startup, Aerospace, AI, Drones

What drone platforms does the company integrate with?

We have integrated with DJI Mavic Series, DJI Matrice 100 and 200 Series, Parrot Anafi series, and Yuneec drones.

Does your system incorporate elements of machine vision and image recognition? What are some of those technologies that overlay the sensors that run natively on the drone or in the cloud?

Yes — vision is an important but not a unique element of our guidance, navigation, and control system. As vision data needs to be processed as quickly as possible, we do this natively on the drone. Also, for end customers in the security domain, we apply machine vision to detect people and vehicles and report back their position on a map to the drone operator.

Separately, for more conventional drone applications, for example, in the construction or mining domains, many companies are building an image analytics platform where lots of pictures are captured to make a 3-D model of the terrain. And then they provide reports to the end customer about what the terrain is like and construction progress. We are now working with a number of these companies to effectively provide that capability.

What are some of the tradeoffs when you’re considering what technology to mount on a drone? I imagine there’s a range vs weight vs speed vs capability dilemma. How do you approach this problem and balance the capabilities needed by your customers?

There’s always a compromise you need to find that works for the application — this is a “systems engineering” problem, and it involves understanding what can exist on the aircraft and what’s better to have off the aircraft.

You see this dilemma not only with drones but also in wider IoT with the benefits of edge computing and more central computing. A lot of the newer drones that we work with have onboard processing capabilities which are great, however, it poses a lot of technical challenges. What you see, for example, is a tradeoff between the computational power of a drone’s onboard computer (and thus how much power it draws) and the endurance the platform will have. Because we do integrate the drones with sensors and guidance software, we can fully enable a non-edge computing system that just transmits video and telemetry and does all processing off-board.

Why did you choose to pursue this particular application of drone technology (Security)?

I think one main reason we chose security is due to the comparatively high cost of regular security drone operations. If you need to fly a drone very, very frequently, on the scale of one or more per day over extended periods of time, the cost becomes very burdensome on the customer ($500 — $1,500 per day). Security on major installations is a 24/7 requirement, you need it all the time. Employing a drone service provider to, for example, fly patrols every 3 hours is going to be very expensive, much more than the cost of a regular guard. Through automation, however, we can reduce the cost of drone security significantly by reducing the dependency on the pilot.

Understood, who is using your system currently and how are they using it?

There are a couple of different classes of customers that we work with. The first, probably the best example of an end client is an asset owner such as a power plant operator. There are often specific security standards that these companies are measured against (e.g., Frequency of patrols) and they will need to make sure that the perimeter has been inspected regularly. We are working with both infrastructure asset owners/operators as well as general security service providers.

Can you give a bit of context on how operators could use drones to help manage their facilities?

Yes, so in the case of facility management, you’re often looking at asset inspections and asset monitoring. An example of one of the most popular users of drone technology today is simply to monitor the state of rooftops and legacy building walls. Today many energy companies with large facilities will contract a drone company to come and inspect their assets. By understanding which highly repetitive and challenging inspection tasks exist, we can deliver an automated and remotely deployed solution to the customer to manage their facilities.

That’s great, how big is the company right now?

It’s still very small, we have eleven people on the team today with the expectation that it will grow this year. When you contrast our progress with that of other companies with more investment and have still not been able to bring products to market, we think we’ve succeeded in achieving more with very limited funding and a comparably small team.

What is Herotech8’s business model and how much financing has Herotech8 raised so far?

For our standard platform today, we do sell the system outright and couple that sale with a support and service agreement. As part of that, we will notify the operator if there’s an issue and get someone out there to fix it. We also have a more recurring revenue-based model where we spread the costs out according to the service that we provide.

In terms of financing, we use our private investment alongside our R&D grants to drive our innovation and grow the business in terms of sales. We are now looking to raise our Seed round.

What is the regulatory environment like in Europe for drones?

It really depends. In Europe, the EASA (European Union Aviation Safety Agency) has yet to implement specific drone flight regulations. And in the U.K. the Civil UK Civil Aviation Authority has a specific document called CAP 722. It basically puts a framework in place for how you can fly a drone without needing explicit approval from the Civil Aviation Authority. But it does tell you very clearly what conditions you need explicit approval to secure a waiver or exemption for. If someone wanted to fly a DJI drone within VLOS (visual line of sight) and away from people and so on you can just go ahead and do that. But for BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) flying and even for EVLOS flying, you would need to secure an exemption. This is similar to what is required around the world.

To get an exemption you need to write and submit what is called an operational safety case for your specific scenario and application to the Civil Aviation Authority. The Civil Aviation Authority will then review it and there’ll be a back and forth and if deemed sufficiently safe, your operational safety case can get approved.

Sidenote — For an article on the difference between VLOS, BVLOS, and EVLOS please check out this link: https://support.droneguide.be/i39-what-s-the-difference-between-vlos-bvlos-and-evlos

What are some of the challenges that Herotech8 faces when it’s deploying a system in the field?

Often a challenge that we have on-site is the overwhelming amount of data that has been captured. We don’t have a problem with it, but serious considerations have to be evaluated with the large amount of data that is captured, for instance, 20+ hours per week of drone footage in 4K — that’s an enormous amount of data and understanding how to manage that data effectively is really important — especially if you’re transmitting across cellular networks! This is a challenge that the whole industry and analytics providers face.

What happens if a drone encounters an intruder or an unexpected object during its patrol?

If a drone is conducting its perimeter patrol and it detects a person in an area that has been marked as an area where it shouldn’t be finding people, this might be, for example, on the fence line, an alert can then be transmitted to the security operators using the system. The operator has the means to pause the flight, redirect the camera, and execute several actions. This might be, for example, climbing in altitude to get a better perspective and gain more situational awareness. They also have the option of tracking that target.

Have you had to address privacy concerns? Take for instance the example of a perimeter fence that’s right next to a highway or a publicly used road.

Not as of yet because we operate in fully controlled environments. What I mean by that is that the site is fully controlled by the operator and the end-user has provided us with permission to fly within the facility. We also restrict users’ ability to operate the drone beyond the property line.

What myths have you had to dispel about drone technology while working in the industry?

That the small platforms aren’t good enough. I hear that quite often and a lot of people are unaware as to how capable these small systems really are. This idea that these small drones only give you poor image quality or stabilization is a myth. These vehicles can be very high performing, can provide excellent image quality, and provide a lot of value to the customer.

If you were to give advice to a fellow founder on how to run a lean startup and go through an R&D process with limited resources, what would be your advice?

There’s a couple of things I would say from a technical view and a few regarding the business side of things. From a technical perspective, I think the most important rule that we now live by is that an unknown problem costs a thousand times more than a known problem. We try very hard to understand where problems can occur so we can put mechanisms in place to ensure that when things do go wrong, we can resolve them. Actively living by this philosophy is, I think, key for a learning robotics company. From a management side of things, communication is really key, particularly when you have teams that are spread out geographically and across software, hardware, control systems, and business. As we’re growing quicker than we have in the past, we really try to make sure everyone is on the same page and that no one is promising things that they can’t deliver. Everyone has to be as transparent as possible.

What excites you the most about Herotech8’s future?

For us, we’re beginning to feel that we have product-market fit, and are now beginning to refine how we approach customers and understanding what the customer needs. This really shows that your product has relevance and has value to our customers. We feel that we’re starting to become scalable as a technology and as a business. We have some incredibly exciting technology that’s coming soon, not just technology, but a real change in the business model of drone usage. I am a big believer in platform technologies like Uber and Airbnb. Drone-in-a-box technology really lends itself to those kinds of technologies. Drone on demand, for example, is going to be an up-and-coming capability and very, very few companies in the world have tapped into that. We have the infrastructure and technology to allow that to happen.