Document type sign electrical services contract south dakota safe
Hello. I'm Kraettli Epperson, CEO of Vigilant Aerospace. I'm going to go through a story here that will hopefully provide you a little bit of a narrative and a deep dive into a step-by-step process that your program, fleet operation, or droneport can follow in order to be able to achieve some of the things that you need to do technically and regulatorily to be able to operate your droneport and achieve the economic impact that you want to achieve. So, we're going to talk about safety systems. We are going to talk about specific software and we're going to talk about a story about a fictional droneport that I'll give us some background for that as we go through this. I'm going to give you a real quick introduction to Vigilant Aerospace first, so you have a little bit of a background on where we're coming from. I'm going to talk about the purpose of these sorts of safety systems in the development of a droneport and why they're so important to get right as you are setting out to build your droneport and your system. I'm going to talk about where we get these recommendations and where we get this information from. Then we're going to go through the story of a town called Wiseville that is going to go through this process. And then finally, I'll give you a little bit more information about the system that we're using as our central safety system in this story, which is FlightHorizon COMMANDER. I'm going to try and leave plenty of time at the end for questions. So, I'm happy to answer questions. Feel free to jot those down and I will definitely try and save time for that. So, a little bit of background about us. We provide safety systems for droneports and for individual pilots - really for both manned and unmanned aircraft. The primary product I'm gonna talk about today is FlightHorizon COMMANDER with integrated hardware. It's primarily software with integrated hardware. It is based on and incorporates an automatic avoidance system that we've exclusively licensed from NASA. It includes a patent. It includes a prototype that's been well tested and then we've commercialized that product and those are the products that we use. And in fact, NASA uses those. So, we're involved in a variety of projects where our system is being used today. These include NASA manned and unmanned aircraft flights, especially including all of their supersonic testing, which goes on off the coast of Galveston and off the coast of Florida. Some of it goes on at Edwards Air Force base at NASA Armstrong out in the Mojave desert. They use our system to
provide geo-fencing, safety and awareness, traffic awareness, and also to do airspace logging. We're also involved in the North Dakota and the Alaska FAA IPP programs. We provided airspace safety for the first IPP flights over people. Flights that occurred in North Dakota. We've recently just come back from Fairbanks, Alaska, where we observed radar testing, and other sensor systems testing that we are evaluating for incorporation into our system where we had encounters between manned aircraft and unmanned aircraft at the Poker Flat Rocket Range. That was a fantastic, great opportunity. The IPP program is doing very interesting work right now. We also went out after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston and worked with a group called Humanitarian-Drones.org to help them do flights for FEMA in which they, in a matter of a few hours, matter of a few hours, were completing entire neighborhoods doing a damage assessment for FEMA. Normally it would take about two weeks for them to walk those neighborhoods and they were able to do that in a matter of hours. Have those reports in, which speeds up aid to those communities really dramatically. We were able to bring our system out there. Turn it on and immediately help them de-conflict small groups of drones that were doing these surveys from NOAA aircraft, Red Cross aircraft, Sheriff aircraft, and other people that needed to be in the airspace, so they could get out of the air when those aircraft had to pass through. We're also working with Oklahoma State University and participating in their 13-mile beyond visual line-of-sight COA. This is a great opportunity to fly aircraft much longer distances using our system and is intended to help pave the way for things like pipeline inspection, electrical line inspection across broader parts of the U.S. I also serve on the ASTM F38 Committee. This is a national and international standards setting body. I'll refer to them a little bit later. They are doing work to help set standards for beyond visual line-of-sight and other standards that can help
to drive the industry forward. Alright, so we have
three product versions. We have the ground control station version. We have our on-board version, which is the small black box, which is our pilot version for doing automatic avoidance on-board. That's in development now. And then we have our COMMANDER version and that's primarily what I'm going to talk about today. That's the product here. Those are actually NASA aerospace managers using this during some supersonic flight testing. So, when we think about what we need to get done at our droneport to make this a reality, we need to think about how we're going to be able to enable beyond visual line-of-sight. That really is the top question. In order to have true economic impact, that is where the industry has to be. That's really what you want for your droneport. So that's what we think about first is: what do we need to do and what do we need to think about? Who are the fliers? What industries are we serving? What are we trying to enable our customers to do? That's the foundational question here. What does safety mean for us and what does it mean to the FAA in the context of where we're located? And so, we're going to get into some of that detail here. But, that's really a starting question. Once you've figured out who your industry is, you've got to figure out what safety means for the types of flights you're going to be doing. What risks do I need to mitigate? And, really, when we talk about standards and regulations, a lot of it is about risk mitigation. What problems do I need to solve to mitigate those risks? And then finally, what's a good step-by-step plan for my droneport to get this done? So, we're going to go through a hypothetical in this process. Alright, so what does the safety system need to do as a part of those larger questions? It needs to help you mitigate risk. It needs to help you be situationally aware of the air traffic and your own aircraft - the unmanned aircraft that you're responsible for at your droneport. You have to know ownship status. So, you need to know where your aircraft is at all times and what the operational status of that aircraft is. You need to be able to detect-and-avoid other aircraft. I'll talk about that in some more detail later. But, that's a really fundamental part of the way the FAA thinks about unmanned aircraft. They have to be able to detect-and-avoid other aircraft the same way a manned aircraft would. You need to maintain what's called "well clear." You have a certain distance, both vertically and horizontally, that you must maintain from other aircraft, most especially manned aircraft. Then, you have to demonstrate that you're operating safely. That you are in regulatory compliance for the regulations that you've chosen to fly under. And then, ultimately, as you achieve waivers or COAs, that you are complying with your waiver or COA. And, that you can document that over time. Right? These are all fundamental things. So, I've got down here from CFR 91, the definition that's often used to drive a lot of the thinking about safety systems are that unmanned aircraft need to be able to see-and-avoid the same way that a manned aircraft is able to see-and-avoid. So, real quickly, where do these recommendations come from that I'm going to go through here? Part 107. Part 105. 135 is emerging as a possible way to do beyond visual line-of-sight and a way to do delivery. And Part 91 is foundational to the way that we think about the airspace existing. Part 107.31 line-of-sight waivers that have already been granted and the types of things that are embedded in those waivers are very important to the way we as a company think about our system and the way that we think about what we need to enable droneports and individual pilots to be able to do. And I'll tell you, we have a study that we're going to be publishing. We have a white paper we've gone through and analyzed in detail all of the waivers that have been issued. That really informs part of what we're talking about today. And we'll make that available probably through the DronePort Network. We look at the operation of LAANC, the way it's working now to get access to airspaces around airports. RTCA SC228 MOPS Phase 1, and then the upcoming Phase 2. Phase 1 is really for on-board systems. And these are larger aircraft, higher altitude, but they do have an impact on the way that we think about Part 107 operators as well. Then phase two is going to have some very interesting things with ground-based detect-and-avoid and ground based use of radars to enable these aircraft. So, we look at those very closely. The IPP teams that we're on. That provides us with a tremendous amount of insight to actually be operating with these teams and be participating in those flights and talking to the observers that are involved in that as we go. Remote ID is currently in a... Has just finished up a process of some commentary and is emerging as a standard and there's also an ASTM F38 standard for remote ID that is coming out. And so that's gonna have a big impact on the way that unmanned aircraft can interact in the airspace. Extremely important stepping-stone and we're excited to see that reaching fruition. SARP well-clear is how we figure out how far away aircraft have to stay from each other and that's an important number that really informs how we manage the airspace. And then JARUS Airspace Risks, figuring out where you're flying, what kind of traffic you have is an important part of your risk mitigation strategy. And so we use that. We are planning to be part of the FAA ASSURE A18, which is a new program for the next stage of ASSURE's detect-and-avoid and unmanned safety research. So, we've started being involved in that. We're on the NASA UTM working group for sense-and-avoid and command and control for UTM. And then finally, I'll just mention we're on ASTM F38 and the various standards. I mentioned all that because you'll likely have questions about why we recommend some of the things that we do. And I'll probably refer back to some of these things. Okay. Now we're going to, I'm going to tell you a story. We're going to go through a narrative of a fictional town called Wiseville and how they've decided to develop a droneport and what that means to them. To start with, the town of Wiseville has decided it would like to explore a local droneport. It currently has an unused, county-owned runway and hangar. This is a story that's common. You may have some assets like this. It happens to be a rural property. There's low population density and low aircraft density and these are all things that they've done some basic research about to figure out that this is a candidate location. The next thing they've done is they've thought about what potential industries could help to drive this droneport. They came into this knowing that they had several ranches nearby. They had a major oil field within 10-miles and then they have additional similar oil fields, other types of operations and other types of agricultural operations within 30 and 60-miles of the location that they're considering. So these are things that come into the picture initially. They've gone out and they've raised a little bit of money to begin figuring this out and maybe improve the facilities. They plan to provide shared resources, as several people have talked about, including airspace safety resources, which we're going to emphasize. To provide lower costs to everyone involved and lower risk for everyone involved because they can go out and they can learn from each other and quickly achieve some of the things that they need to achieve. After they've made this initial decision to pursue this, they go out and approach the industries. Hypothetically, in this case, we're going to choose a few operators who are going to be your initial sponsors or the targets for your droneport. They plan to have two onsite service providers and one corporate operator. The two onsite service providers who hopefully will rent and otherwise use the droneport are all agricultural survey specialists. They provide services using small and midsize multi-rotors. They've got a FLIR camera to help find hot spots that need attention in an agricultural setting, whether that's in fields with crops or whether it is cattle. And, they also have one oil and gas production company [that] has a small fixed wing with a multispectral-sensor that's out looking for leaks, particularly methane leaks, other types of leaks. in their facilities and in their gathering lines. So those are our model users for this droneport. They know that they need beyond visual line-of-sight in order to reach their major customers and initially their target is to be able to do it within 10-miles of the location of the droneport. So that's where we're going to start with us. So they go out and they do some analysis. So they have to ask themselves some basic questions about how they're going to enable this operation and reach their beyond visual line-of-sight goal and attract many more users and operators to this droneport. So they discovered that they're in Class G airspace. So that means it is uncontrolled airspace and they should be able to fly under Part 107 with very few limitations. If instead it turned out that they were, say near an airport, then they might need to be in a position to either pursue a special COA or to use the LAANC system to get authorization to be near that airport. Where ultimately, as many people, of course, are beginning to do, is they might operate at a small airport, in which case you would typically sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the airport. You would have a set of rules that your operators would sign onto when they want to fly from that airport. That would help to define how you're able to use those assets cooperatively. Ultimately, of course, if you are trying to do to deliver, you may put yourself on a path to fly a certified aircraft with certified ground-based or on-board systems and you might fly under Part 135, which would allow you to achieve those certifications and be able to ultimately reach longer distances and possibly do delivery. So as, as we heard earlier, very exciting to hear that that path is developing. So you look at your airspace risk classification. You figure out how many aircraft are flying here. How would we classify that? And that can help us to make our safety case, which is ultimately what we're going to have to do. We're going to have to say, well, we're only likely to encounter aircraft this often and that means that we need to have this system which establishes what our overall risk is. And that's really the way the ASTM F38 standards around detect-and-avoid are emerging. And the way that other people are developing standards is to say: "What is the risk and what is the system necessary for this airspace?" You then figure out what your detect-and-avoid and well clear requirements are. Throughout the United States they're likely to be the SARP standards. So, you've got an easy case there. In other countries it's slightly different, but they're all within a certain range. You're going to look at your primary airspace. But, you also want to be aware of local, nearby airspaces in which you may interact or your flyers may have to fly towards or through. So, other airports you have to be aware of them. And, obviously, you're going to want to be talking to all of these people as you develop your safety case and your operating case. And then, you're going to look at what shared assets you need. And so, we'll get into that in a little more detail here. But, our goal is to fly beyond visual line-of-sight 10-miles and then 30 and 60 as we mature. Okay, so we've done our analysis. Now we have to develop a plan. So as part of our plan, we're going to develop something that's in the industry called a Concept of Operations or ConOp. This becomes a document that helps to drive what you're going to tell the FAA and others - underwriters, companies that you're servicing - about how you operate your aircraft and then what your safety case is. And then, that becomes part of your standard operating procedure, which all of your operators sign-off on; [they] may have their own variation based on their own aircraft. But, you have a standard operating procedure that becomes a very important part of the case you're going to make to your regulator. You look at your strategic risk mitigation. So, you know we're only flying at certain places; at certain times; and, that allows us to use certain systems for safety and coordination. It means that we have to know what our communications methods are for these spaces at these times. And then you proceed through a procedural risk mitigation process. And I'll just mention very quickly, these are things like: your aircraft maintenance plan, your preflight and post-flight checks, your training program, your communications program, your incident reporting program, your airspace logging, your flight-logging process. All of these things, which can be written down, are part of a process and part of a training program that begins to turn your system and your droneport into the kind of place that people want to do business. Right? This is an important part of this. Then you look at tactical risk mitigation and that's really where we begin to talk about the system and where the technology can begin to enable your droneport. So, you want to have airspace management. You want to have situational awareness, so you know about the air traffic that's coming into your airspace. You want to be able to do detect-and-avoid or sense-and-avoid, so the aircraft that are unmanned that you're responsible for and have to be able to say that they can do detect-and-avoid against other aircraft and avoid those aircraft; [it] can actually do that. And then, ultimately, we would expect in the future UTM, unmanned traffic management integration. So, the solution at the heart of this problem that we're going to talk about is our FlightHorizon COMMANDER product. We would install the safety system - the airspace management. It would provide airspace management and situational awareness. It's a self-contained UTM in the sense that it accepts information, tracks all of the aircraft, predicts trajectories, predicts potential conflicts and helps maintain well clear. It's intended to either operate in a standalone, self-contained manner as, for example, NASA and other people use it now or to interact with other systems as those other systems emerge. [FlightHorizon] provides strategic deconfliction in that you will plan and see where aircraft are going to be in your space. But, most importantly it provides tactical deconfliction in that it provides you real-time, continuously cycling awareness of aircraft entering and exiting airspace while tracking exactly where your aircraft is and providing a prediction of your closest point of approach for those aircraft. And then, ultimately, it provides your see-and-avoid and detect-and-avoid. Now that we have our solution in mind, we have to implement the technology. So, we bring this system in and I'm going to go over real quickly some of the components. I'll go over a little bit more of this in some more detail in a few minutes. The first thing you have is integration to the flight controller or autopilot, so that you have real-time information about the status, location, direction, [and] other information about your aircraft. That comes directly into this central orange box, which is the software, that is really doing the airspace model and management, the prediction of where the aircraft are going to be. And then ultimately, avoidance when necessary. You would have an ADS-B receiver, so that you can track larger manned aircraft that are cooperative aircraft that are broadcasting with an ADS-B transponder. You always want to have that so you're aware of those other aircraft. But not every aircraft will be cooperative. So for aircraft that are noncooperative, you would have a radar. There are emerging radars. There's one in particular that we've done an integration with and are now doing some testing over the next several months. There are several that we're talking to. These are relatively affordable. In many cases, they are actually portable radars. They are radars that are intended, ult
mately, to actually go on the aircraft. You're carrying your radar with you. It's really exciting developments going on in the industry. Of course, you'll be able to go see some of these radars of you walk around the hall. You'll see them talking about what their latest and greatest radar is. But, we bring all three of these pieces of information into the system. It weights them, values them, and figures out if there is a potential for these aircraft to get too close to each other. That's called a well clear boundary. It will then provide to the airspace manager and/or to the pilot - and, ultimately, our system is designed to provide this to the autopilot. Right now it provides it to the airspace manager and to the pilot - a specific recommendation on an avoidance maneuver. The most efficient maneuver and the fastest maneuver within the bounds of the performance of your aircraft to deconflict and self-separate from that potential conflict. And to maintain well clear. You want to avoid the paperwork, right? You don't want an NMAC, which is when the aircraft get too close to each other. So, maintaining well clear is really what the system is designed to do. And so this is the fundamental heart of the safety system to meet the requirements for maintaining safety at your droneport. Real quickly. This is what the interface typically looks like. You've got your ownship - is the white aircraft in the middle. You've got these blue tracks of the predicted trajectories of other aircraft that are being tracked. You have a potential collision in this case and so it's going to start yelling at you. It'll put text on the screen saying: "Turn right. Turn right. Turn right." And it will provide you with a green line
saying: "Go to this point right now." Ultimately, it'll do the
same thing to your autopilot, but this is the piloted or the airspace
manager user interface for this system. And this is really where the NASA patent and the NASA prototype comes in. Okay. So we've done that. We've installed the system. What we've heard over and over from the FAA through the IPP programs and other programs is they really like you to: Crawl. Walk. Run. What that means is that they want to see you using the least advanced operation to achieve your goal. Prove that that works. Why, for example, visual line-of-sight with a system like this, where you can demonstrate that you're using the system. That you're seeing the air traffic. That you are completely logging your flights. Then, provide that to the FAA as a part of the next step in your authorization and enablement. And then, do the next step where, for example, you might be flying beyond visual line-of-sight with a visual observer. You do exactly the same thing. You document it carefully. Our system will do all the flight logs for you. It will log everything it sees in the airspace continuously and you can replay that. NASA uses it for analysis for example. And that allows you to be able to prove exactly what you've seen and what you've done. So, you go through this process. The first thing you're going to do when you've collected this data... You go out and fly at visual line-of-sight with your standard operating procedure and then you select a likely candidate. As was discussed earlier, your actual waiver or COA holder is not the droneport; it is a particular service provider or operator who needs that particular waiver. You can begin to achieve some milestones and create a path for others to follow using shared equipment and shared resources. But you have to have that first candidate who's going to go and apply. That might be a public entity that will apply for COA. It might be a private entity that will apply for a waiver which, of course in this case, these are private entities. They're going to apply for a waiver. They go out and they apply specifically for a waiver to the Part 107.31, which is visual line-of-sight operation of the aircraft. They respond to questions and then they get a waiver to do beyond visual line-of-sight with a visual observer. We're doing this with a COA right now. We have a 13-mile COA, that I talked about earlier, with Oklahoma State University and this is exactly what we're doing. Right? You go through this process. You have a visual observer, and then you begin to log all of your flights. Ultimately, you fly with your visual observer. You document it. You go along your route. Utilize the system both to track your aircraft. and all of the surrounding aircraft. You document that and then you go out and reapply with your radar-based system and graduate to a beyond visual line-of-sight waiver or COA without a visual observer or with a visual observer, as Tom described, that is sitting watching a screen and providing you with that see-and-avoid assurance for your flights. So, you have a pilot. You have an airspace manager. You have a visual observer who's now using a screen. Right? That's where we are headed in the industry. Then you can go out and reapply with additional service. providers and be in a situation where you can attract, because you've established this milestone at your location, you can attract additional flyers. So that's our story of Wiseville. That's how you would go out and actually implement these systems. It's a process and a series of steps that you can follow. I'm going to talk just a little bit more about our product, because I just kind of brushed by it there. And then, hopefully, we'll have some time for questions. This is kind of... I showed you one with some of the hardware, but this is a very simplified picture of how this works. You've got the airspace model, prediction and avoidance. That's the piece of software that runs in the middle. That can run on a server. It can run on a laptop or even a tablet. NASA will put it on a kneeboard tablet and have. F-18 pilots, who are doing supersonic flights, actually monitoring and have geo-fencing on their own airspace while they're doing those supersonic flights, so that they are not caught by surprise by someone who is not supposed to be in that airspace when they're moving very fast. But, you can run it a variety of places and then it will output to the airspace management display. Or, ultimately, we plan for it to output to an autopilot. It's pulling information in from the drone itself. It's pulling information in from, a transponder receiver. That's that ADS-B receiver, which is a transponder that's commonly carried. And, it's really supposed to be on all aircraft January, 2020, that fly in controlled airspace in the United States. There are other countries where it really is already pretty much universal. Then you have the radar and the radars are developing quickly. Many of them... I've just worked with a company in Alaska that was easily getting 3-kilometers. Like, easily getting 3-kilometers. And so, we expect that it's going to go out to 6-kilometers and 12-kilometers. If you're willing to have a larger - this was a little tiny unit. I mean this was size of a couple of cell phones. If you're willing to have a slightly larger unit because you're starting and willing to use a ground based system, you're going to be able to get much longer ranges almost immediately. That's where you can begin to integrate radar into your operation. And then future sensors. We have have worked with groups that are using audible sensors that are listening and are able to determine where an aircraft might be so that you can then pay attention to that sector. Those are our actually receiving a lot of favor from some of the regulators. So there are things that can help provide really wide awareness quickly and pretty inexpensively. So everything I'm describing here is relatively affordable and that's why we take this approach with this package. So, it all comes in, goes through the prediction process and then, ultimately, if you have a situation where it's predicting that you're going to lose well clear, it will tell you to self-separate. It'll say you need to do this right now. So it's a turnkey single subscription system. We do sell it on a subscription. Single point of contact for the management of your system. Designed to work with both cooperative and non-cooperative intruding aircraft into your airspace. It's for tracking alerts, warnings, active detect-and-avoid really has a built in concept of operations. And that's really a lot of the, the package that we're providing is that we are trying to include everything in the package. It's the idea is that we are avoiding complexity. We're doing the hardware integration upfront for you. You don't have to necessarily go out,
pick a sensor, integrate it, test it, and then establish that you're going to use it. We're doing that work up front by participating in the programs that we're participating in. And then, ultimately, we're working on helping organizations get these waivers and COAs. So we do provide consulting services around this and the implementation of this system. We do have a specific process that we suggest droneports go through in order to achieve these beyond visual line-of-sight authorizations. It's pretty much everything I just went through with Wiseville. A few things kind of added here in the middle, but this is the process that we would typically take you through. I won't do a full... That's its own presentation - a little different than the one I gave. And that is my presentation. Here's our contact information. We'd be delighted to talk to you further. Thank you very much to the DronePort Network and the UAS Cluster Initiative for giving us this opportunity. [Applause] Are there any questions from the group? So, Kraettli, we've spoken before and I just really want to ask the question that I asked you before. I appreciate your answer from last year on this, but how does your system futureproof as the UTM gets more standardized throughout the United States and into the future? What's the process with your software and hardware so that folks can minimize the cost moving forward? Absolutely. Our system is highly modular. Each of these sensors that we add is actually a separate module. UTM to us as a module so that we can pull information in and push information out to it. I'll say a couple of things about UTM. As I said earlier, I'm on the NASA UTM working group - particularly for sense-and-avoid/detect-and-avoid and then for command and control, because it impacts the way that we think about detect-and-avoid. I don't want to speculate too much where UTM is going, but I'll just point out some industry trends that you can track. There are organizations that are planning to roll out essentially private UTMs. Google Wing, for example, has their own flavor of UTM that they use and plan to use to interact with other people. You have a variety of companies that are providing an interface into UTM, but they're not intending to be sort of a backbone server. There's an expectation that either FAA will run or will delegate the running of, essentially, a backbone server through which competing organizations and competing USS. The USS is an unmanned service supplier. It's the company that provides you with the software with which you interact with UTM that they can talk to each other without necessarily their servers having to talk to each other. If they do, they talk to each other in a very standardized, regulated sort of way. That's what we're gradually seeing emerge with UTM. For us as a company, it means we're really eager to have a system that provides a lot of those services on a self-contained, independent basis. There are people that we know of who are using our system now who need all of that. Right? They need both the user interface where they can see what's going on in the airspace. They need something that's tracking aircraft independently using a variety of methods to see what's coming into the airspace. And then, can help tell you what to do about. Our system kind of does the full-cycle and the full-circle. But, we fully expect that we're also going to be interacting outwards to other systems that will provide additional information about aircraft that are coming into that space. Our system is well-suited to be able to provide a USS, which is the end user interface through which you interact with a UTM system. At this point it's actually also providing independently its own backend, right? So it's actually doing the work to track the aircraft and figure out where they should be and where they shouldn't be. Ultimately, we expect that we'll be informed and be able to interact with other USS providers, either through common industry servers or directly through an FAA server. If an FAA server is set up to do that, which may be the case or it may be that industry is primarily doing this. I've had interesting discussions with people where they've said: "You know, on the Internet, you're not talking to a government server, you're talking to your Internet service provider's server, and yet you can talk and send email and communicate with people that are on different ISPs. Why is that? The government's not doing that. There are standards. Everyone inter-cooperates at internet hotels and other places to make all that happen. There's a vision that that may be the direction that UTM goes. But in any case, we're very UTM aware. We're eager for UTM to be here because then we can provide our system and know that is interacting safely with other people who are flying adjacent or on top of us. Thank you very much. Okay. Kraettli. Thank you again very much. [Applause]
