Caption Cattle station training (Aviassist archives)

 Our new Nightingale Blackbird drone is battery operated and lives in a hive that powers it and is connected directly to a network. The key though, about autonomous drones such as Nightingale, is not how well they fly, it’s about how well they land. Because if you can’t land them in the right place, you can’t get the information or recharge them. Blackbird flies like normal drones, but it’s outfitted with security-enabled adornments such as a thermal-imaging camera. Customers here in Australia refer to this type of technology as ‘drone in a box’. The box opens, out pops the drone, flies around and does its thing. This one, in particular, has its own weather station, so it knows whether it’s safe to fly.

Suppose you’ve got somebody trying to break through a fence and a CCTV camera detects it. In that case, the drone can self-deploy, shoot across and take immediate footage of what’s going on. That’s something that might take much longer if you put a manned security control over there. It can also go on perimeter patrols, or on specific missions that you task it to do as well.

It’s all built around the client-use case, and every client has a different CONOP situation or Concept of Operations. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Think about a household name supermarket that has a distribution centre, which is a high-value asset because of both the amount of goods that are held within that facility and because there are some high-value goods held there, rather than out in stores.

These things are sometimes subject to let’s call it ‘forward reconnaissance’ by bad people who might want to go and use a drone themselves, thereby preserving their anonymity. In that type of scenario, this drone, using AI, can pick up anomalies such as when a drone comes over a perimeter line. Or it can use object recognition, meaning it can know specifically what object it’s looking for. These applications can promote an automated response from Blackbird to go and deal with the situation, by, say, taking thermal imaging or recording the incident for forensic purposes later on.

When we provide the drone, we build a capability known as a ROC, which is a remote operation centre. A client might come to me and say, “Our concept of operations is that we want a perimeter patrol once an hour because we have vulnerabilities around our assets, and so we want to make sure these are monitored properly. If we see an incident happening on the CCTV camera, we want the drone to auto-launch.” Customers provide us with that information. And then, effectively, we would monitor that and report back to that business when an incident happens. Some companies, though, have got 24/7 eyes on glass anyway, looking at CCTV footage, so then it’s a case of thinking, “Does the drone respond quicker than a human being? Can it get eyes on site quicker?”

AI and machine learning will drive the drone market through the next couple of decades. I’m nearly 50, and in the early ’90s, when mobile phones came out, it was a funny thing that you could make a phone call on. And now you look at the development of that tech over the past couple of decades: today, smartphones have facial recognition, AI and machine learning sitting within the operating system. It’s incredible. The drone industry is just like that.

It’s going to be disruptive, and it’s not going to go away because it’s a really useful tool, whether you are a commercial organisation who wants to increase the bottom line profit by using automation, rather than using people, or because you are a consumer who wants to get that awesome selfie pic or go on a motorbike ride and have the drone track you. The applications for drones are endless.

We are going to have drone deployments globally that are as pervasive as mobile phones. I don’t think we’re going to get to the level of Singapore, where everyone’s got 2.3 devices, but I certainly think that at least every household will have a drone. Every enterprise will have a fleet of drones.

Every government will be using drones to perform government operations. What’s that going to drive? That’s going to drive natural efficiencies and natural capability where people recognise there is more that a drone can do, and that will enable more jobs to be done autonomously.

We’re going to be in a space in the world where drones are hugely pervasive, incredibly intelligent, can learn the jobs as they go and get better at their jobs as well. We’re going to be in that space very quickly. And that will drive so much economy and will reduce our carbon footprint because we’re not using petrol to power these things. They’re not going away anytime soon.

The security business in Australia is circa $10 billion per annum. That’s what companies spend. I would suggest this is one of the biggest disruptors of that industry ever and it will take boots off the ground.

AI and machine learning will drive the drone market through the next couple of decades

I’ll give you a couple of examples. I’ve seen a couple of quasi-government tenders here recently in Canberra, and one of the specific passages of the tender is, “How can you innovate to reduce your carbon footprint on a distributed-site basis?” So, they’re saying, “How can you secure a site for me that’s remote without having to drive there?” Well, the answer is simple. You deploy a drone that can do the job for you. You have the drone living on site. If you’ve got 10 sites, say, you would think naturally you would need 10 people looking after 10 drones, but you might only need one person to look after those 10 drones and take action and do something with it.

Or maybe you’ll need a small team to deploy if something terrible is happening. They will absolutely disrupt the market. Right now, the lovely thing is it’s viewed as an augmentation. Because it’s an emerging technology, and I don’t think anybody’s going to wholesale just change human nature and just completely remove the human from the loop and put in drones everywhere. It will be a gradual process, but it will disrupt the industry.

Lee Croft is the chief executive of Canberra-based Department 13, which distributes sUAS and counter-sUAV systems in Australia and the US.