Dock for X10: Remote Inspection & Patrol, From an Office Chair

Hi, everyone, and welcome to our Skydio utility live demo of remote operations. My name is Christina Park. I'm the head of energy strategy here at Skydio, and I'm happy to be here today with my colleague, Corey Corey Hitchcock.

We both came ourselves from the utility industry. I had fifteen years of, engineering and asset management experience at the New York Power Authority.

Corey?

Hey. I'm Corey Hitchcock. I come from a a twenty four year career at Southern Company, where I was, lineman at Georgia Power and distribution transmission and then, went on to develop the drone program or help develop the drone program for Southern Company. So, excited to show you what we've got today.

Yeah. As we talk about the value of using technology, in particular drones for inspections in the utility environment, we're really at a stage where we've seen that there are many different kinds of drones out there. But the next step is to really be able to operate them remotely, which and by that, we mean not necessarily having a person tethered to the drone with a controller standing underneath it, but being able to operate it from wherever you are. So, Corey, where are you today?

Today, I'm in Tampa, Florida, and, we're gonna go, do some inspections out in the Fort Collins, Colorado area. And then, in the, and then we're gonna move over to, ClearView and, do some inspections there.

So I am actually at Clearview in, the Bay Area in California at the moment. And I think if we could do a little bit of role playing, this would be like a real life scenario that you could do today with drone solutions. So I, as, for example, if I were the head of asset management in Clearview Power and Light, fictitious utility, let's pretend, this is where I am, I may want to look at some components either on my own site or a satellite site that we have over in Colorado.

And my operator, Corey, is actually in Florida, and that's not a problem. He can operate from wherever he is and share the information with me as well. So I think we're gonna have a QR code pop up so that you, from the audience, you can certainly watch on our screen what's happening on Corey's screen, but you can actually get a higher definition livestream on your own phone from wherever you are. So the value of this is really to say that you can have stakeholders. Corey and I are three thousand miles apart right now, but we can actually operate in real time with the same information and make decisions together as we do our inspections. So if you have a phone, please feel free to scan this QR code, and it will take you so that you have your own high definition livestream of what Corey is seeing on the screen.

Okay. So, Christina, I guess you needed me to go do this, solar plant inspection. We've had, less than nominal output on this PV plant, and you wanted to go look at that this morning?

Yes. I put in a work order for this because we have found that our normal maintenance strategies have been insufficient. We've been finding some panels that have been degrading or getting deteriorated faster than anticipated.

So before I order my spare parts and really kind of optimize, for what I have in the warehouse, I'd like to get a little more information.

Okay. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and, I have a preplan mission.

What we're looking at here is the dispatch view, and I've just selected this dispatch view to show that, we've selected the call that, or the work order for the solar inspection, and we can see that we're about forty eight seconds away from it, and we're about a third of a mile away. So I'm gonna go back and identify or find my I'm going to find my mission that I have preplanned. So we've got the Christman Field solar inspection here, and we're gonna run that mission.

I'm gonna pick the vehicle and tap run.

Something that's important to note here in this operating environment is that we're operating at a private airport, and, we don't want the drone or the operators to be able just to fly willy nilly around the airport, due to the the safety of flight there, because this is an active airport.

And so what we've done is create, these keep out and keep in zones. So these are basically volumes. Think of it like a geofence, but they're in three d. So we can see the preplanned mission. The way point's one, two, three, four there.

And what's gonna happen is the drone's gonna launch. It's gonna transition under the threshold of the three six runway, and then through this through this little tunnel here, and then we're gonna be able to, move over to our PV plant and, conduct our inspection.

So I'm gonna go ahead When we talk about these, zones, especially with the runway, is the idea that we're just keeping the drone out of the way in case there's a plane that comes by?

Yeah. Absolutely. We're we're keeping we're making sure that at no time the drone will ever cross the runway or or be in an unsafe position, with planes, launching and recovering there.

Great.

So we're gonna transition under this, we're gonna transition under this runway here. We're gonna take a second to get a good solid GPS lock. Looks like that's happening.

And then we're gonna move on, across the runway threshold there.

So you said this was a preplanned mission. I think one of the advantages of having a docked drone is that you can send the drone out to inspect whenever you like instead of necessarily having to find a person to go out there by themselves with their equipment.

Absolutely. And you can also do it in bite sized chunks. If, you, you know, you you don't have time to inspect the whole plant, but you got time to look at a little bit of it, you can, you know, pick a part of the plant and then operate that, that mission for that. So we can see here. We also have another pretty cool view that is a bird's eye view of what the drone's seeing in the three d space based off the, the map representation there. And then once we get to our location, I'm gonna, change the view over to a, more, kind of inspection based view. I'm gonna expand the, the view of the PV plant.

Great. So now I can see the panels.

How would you know which one we're looking at?

So we can we can look on the map and kinda see where the where the aircraft is as it moves over the PV plant. We're gonna get to the center to the inverters, and we're gonna start from there because we've already inspected to the south, and we're gonna pick up right here and, and start our start inspecting. And we're gonna transition to thermal once we, once we get over there.

Great. So the drone is equipped with both visual and thermal, it looks like. And I think for solar, I definitely wanna see what the temperature gradient is, and the condition of these panels.

Alright. So I am going to pause this mission and take over manually and see if, if we can see any solar defects here.

Oh, looks like we've got a cell level defect on that panel right there.

I can descend a little bit.

Let me have a look at the rest of these.

So, traditionally, how would these thermal scans be done out in the field?

Does a person just walk around with Typically yeah.

Before drones, a person would walk around with a handheld, thermal camera, and they would try to, you know, investigate the or or inspect the PV plant that way.

Now, with drones, we're able to see like, you could see there in the center of the screen, we've got a cell level defect at the bottom left of that panel.

And, you know, we can we can also create a mapping mission and then run, with Skydio Cloud, we can run the, data through third party solutions like Raptor Maps or, DroneDeploy.

Looks like we've got another one up here Oh, wow.

In the top left.

The You just see? The but while we were looking at these solar or at the panels, it looks like we've got a intrusion alert at the plant.

Let me have a look at that call and see what that says.

Looks like alarms on the fence line and inside the plant have activated. I'm gonna go ahead and have the drone respond there. I'm gonna change back to my visible camera and then see what we get.

So I think what's interesting is that if I if we look from the visual view, it's impossible to tell that you have those cell level defects.

Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that's thermals kind of a requirement there, and our six forty by five twelve thermal resolution allows us to to really get down to and see those cell level defects.

So what I've done now is, selected the, intrusion alert that we have here at the plant, and I clicked respond. The drone is autonomously flying to this location.

You can do this with, various devices on your system, various outputs from your OMS, and you can do that. So now we're gonna have a look around and and see what we can see.

Oh, looks like you got something there.

Can you zoom in on that? Oh, there we go.

Looks like we got a person with tan pants and a navy or black shirt there, on the outside. We had an intrusion alarm at the inverter site there, so I'm gonna, motion detector went off there. So I'm gonna fly over to this inverter, that we were just at and do a little closer inspection, see what I can see.

Yeah. This is really helpful. I think that when we think about utility inspections, there are some that are planned like what we were originally doing, for asset management purposes, in order to help our asset management strategies. But at the same time, it's nice to know that when there's a trigger or an alert that we can actually use the drone to get there faster than it would be to roll a truck to send a person to investigate.

Yeah. And so so what I'm gonna do here is have a look at these, transformers, the step up transformers inside the plant.

And with Skydio's collision avoidance, I don't have to really, be an expert pilot to get this close. All of these obstacles that are that are inside the solar plant, the Skydio collision avoidance will allow us to, or allow the drone me to operate with confidence and allow the drone to to not run into stuff. So we're gonna have a look at the closing mechanism here.

Okay. So, while this this transformer is behind the fence, there's no locks there.

The NESC doesn't require locks behind the fence, but, potentially, they were there. So we may have somebody come out and just have a look at this stuff and make sure that there wasn't any damage. But it looks like the captive bolts are still in place.

So I think we're at least the the plant is safe, and we can have the the appropriate people respond.

I think given that we just had an intruder alert and we saw somebody on the perimeter, it might be a good idea for me to order some parts and maybe we should put on lock a lock on that just in case.

Yeah. That sounds good.

Let me see what else we got. Looks like we've had some other calls come in. We've got let me check this one out. The police department reports a car hit a pole in front of the Christman Field Airport, so that's where we're at here.

I'm gonna go ahead and manually, get back on the other side of the runway, And I'm gonna bring up my I'm gonna bring up my my map.

So that's really interesting because I think that drones can be used by a variety of industries.

And I think that when the nine one one call comes in, the immediate thought that it goes to police or fire or EMTs, particularly if there's an accident, like a car hitting a pole. But at the same time, utilities also need that information because it's my pole, and I need to know that my pole is okay, because that damage to that pole, even if it didn't cause an outage right away, could cause, trauma, and and a potential repair. And it would be really good to know what the state of that is before it actually causes a power outage.

Yeah. Totally. And and, also, there were times when I was a troubleman at the power company working the overnight shift on a on a Friday night into Saturday morning, and and we would just get a lights out notification that, you know, a certain device was affected, and then we would, you know, go patrol behind that device. And then I can't tell you how many times I have come up on come upon, you know, serious vehicle accidents that, that no one knew about.

And so we were able to get help to the, to the folks there and, you know, we we knew what was going on. It I think having the doc based drone to be able to go out and find those things, not only is gonna improve your system operations, but it's gonna help you be a better citizen where you serve.

Yeah. I think in that situation, obviously, that was, before this technology existed. But if that had occurred today, you could actually put that ReadyLink up and call your local, EMT and fire department so that they could also see and understand, what kind of support they needed to send.

Absolutely.

So what we're gonna do here, this poll had been hit overnight, and, the PD said there wasn't really wasn't really much damage to the poll. But because this poll is involved in a MBA, we're gonna do a quick inspection on it and see what we can see.

I think something else that's important to note is that we're operating under a Beyond Visual Line of Sight waiver. As Christina said in the beginning, we, I'm in Tampa. This drone and dock, I'm flying real time in Fort Collins, Colorado, and, and we're able to do that, with the help of our regulatory services folks.

Alright. So let's see if we can't get in and have a look at this switch.

Looks like it's all modern polymer hardware, so, really, the only thing that that could be damaged is this switch. So I just wanna make sure that switch is closed because it manages to pull off in the, it it's I guess this is the source for the airport, so we don't want the airport to go down.

Definitely not. There would be a lot of calls about that, and I think we've seen in the news, in the last few months that, Heathrow went down, and had that power outage that caused, I don't know, seventy thousand, rerouted flights or something like that.

Yeah. And something else that's really cool to note is that, other drones don't have this feature. What what you're seeing right now is what's called frame lock, and it's really, really cool.

You can move around, and then the drone will do its best to to maintain what component it is that you're looking at in in focus. So you don't really have to be flying the drone. You can look like I wanna look over here at this bolt.

I can stop and the drone will lock on to this, the bolt or the clevis and will hang out there until I move it or change its point of interest to something else. But this switch looks good. So, we're gonna go on and check out our last call that we've got.

And let me see what that's gonna be.

Looks like that's gonna be a operation on transmission with, fault location analysis.

And looks like the fault's located a hundred and fifty feet from the, Russfield substation, so we're gonna, go respond to that.

And I'll go back. I'll leave the map on so you guys can kinda see what we're looking at here.

Yeah. So if we think about this and and zoom out well, figuratively zoom out in the overall workflow management, I I think it's pretty cool because I, as someone in asset management, I can put in work orders, and tickets for Corey to go out and inspect the assets that I wanna see. But at the same time, as you can see here, there are calls that have come in, that as he's going out, he can go and investigate those and get the information, in real time and immediately, where information is needed so that people can respond.

Hold on. I gotta change the setting. I had it set for up and o or backtrack, but now we're gonna use up and over. And what that's gonna do is allow the drone to calculate how far we are from the dock and then tell us whenever we need to come back.

Alright. And we can see in the AR, the augmented reality on the map that that the location of our call.

So we're able to get lat longs from the fault location analysis and be able to, use that to, you know, send the drone to the right location. So we're gonna fly out here here and have a look at this transmission and then have a look around the substation from outside the fence, because, we wanna make sure that we wanna make sure that there wasn't any damage with that fault being being that close to the station.

So, Corey, I noticed that you had a pop up that said the boost was activated. It looks like you're covering a lot of terrain here.

Yeah. I'm moving at thirty six miles an hour. So, the the cool thing about this, the the x ten is that you can adjust the speed of the aircraft. I'm just flying with a keyboard and a mouse, and you can adjust the speed of the aircraft based off of, how close you are to, your assets.

Right? So we're pulling up on this transmission. I'm gonna go ahead and turn boost mode off and allow me to move a little slower. There's even a a crawl mode for, you'll see here in just a second as I get close to this, this poll top.

I'm going to slow drastically slow down.

We suspect there, that this is a lightning event.

We only had an operation. That operation was or we had one operation. The operation was due was in the middle of a of a weather event. So we're gonna have a look at the top of this poll and see if we can.

I'm gonna activate crawl, and I'm gonna start moving a little bit closer.

And in addition in addition to, you know, the collision avoidance that Skydio has, our heads up display gives us a lot of information a lot of information to the operator.

The key thing I'm using right here is the ability to see that my gimbal is pointed down at thirty five degrees, and I'm looking at the top of the pole. Looks like it started to rain a little bit. Not a problem because we have we have the ability yeah.

We have the ability to operate in light rain. So, I don't see any damage to the top there. We're gonna see if we can't look at the see if we can't look at this power bank, see if there's anything going on there.

We can see our sight glasses and this level of detail we can see from outside the station.

I'll go ahead and zoom back out and you can see how far away we actually are from the power transformer. But we can get into, the the Skydio obstacle avoidance, allows us to operate inside stations, and and that's typically what most of our customers are doing, are installing docks inside stations, to support station operations. And, so I'm gonna go ahead and head back to our dock.

How does the drone know where the dock is after it's gone to a bunch of different places that it wasn't originally planned for?

So so the the drone remembers where the dock is. We do some, some setup in the beginning. So as we install the dock, there's some commissioning that goes on, and that that position that the dock is in is is always remembered by the drone.

And, and it has the ability to autonomously return to the dock as well. So but I'm manually flying it here because I've gotta cross this road. And, and until we, have a parachute, we we're gonna have to not fly over moving vehicles and unprotected people. So I'm gonna pause here right before we cross this road and, make sure it's clear to cross.

Yeah. I think another feature we can call out here is you can see the name of the road. So when we think about that car hit pull inspection we did earlier, if there was a need to send a crew out there to do a repair, it would be easier to help them locate because you know exactly where you're looking. So these overlays look really helpful.

Yeah. They definitely are. And I can increase the level of detail here on the, augmented reality overlay.

I'll show you that real quick before I land.

Okay. So what what I just did is turn on the augmented reality overlay, and what that's done is allow the, the street name and stuff to be overlaid, in the drone's view so you kinda have a better understanding of where you're at.

Alright. I'm gonna go ahead and land here.

Christina, was there one more site you wanted to look at?

Yeah. I think actually, I got, a call from someone in our building, here at Clearview in San Mateo, California. So I was wondering if you could switch docks and drones and actually come over here and do an inspection for me in California.

Sure.

Let let me get this, this drone landed, and, we will, we'll transition over to Clearview.

Awesome. Yeah. I actually had surgery six weeks ago, so it's a little hard for me to actually hobble out there, and take a look. But I'd really appreciate it if you could launch the drone off of the roof and, scope out the situation for me.

Yeah. No problem. So, our drones landed here, and I'm gonna go ahead and transition over. That's such a cool view to me, and, it doesn't get old watching a drone land a couple thousand miles from me.

So now I've transitioned over to a dispatch page here at our Clearview campus. And what I'm gonna do is I think what you need did you need me to look at a a car hit a transformer or something? Was that, about what you were interested in?

Yeah. And I think there are a couple other assets here too, but I don't think it's raining here in California. Not that it seemed to have been a problem in Colorado, but where are the drones?

Oh, I see. I think they're on our roof here.

Yeah. They're on the roof, so that's what we'll see there.

I thought I heard about a car hitting a pole to the west of building either.

So let me Or it might have been on Hillsdale.

Let's just take a look.

Okay.

Hold on a minute. I gotta transition to with my quick two factor authentication here. Hold on just a second.

Yeah. I think it's a real game changer. I think you know, I came from the New York Power Authority where we obviously serve the state of New York. But even within the state of New York, we had different power plants, across the state. It would take me about nine hours to drive from our headquarters in White Plains all the way over to, Buffalo and Niagara, where where one of our major power plants was. So the ability to have your staff in multiple locations and be able to get information and stream it and make decisions together, I think, is really valuable, for utility asset management, and also just various departments such as engineering, transmission, and distribution, and generation.

So today, we got to see a little bit of all those spaces. We got a little peek in the substation, flew down some distribution lines, as well as looking at solar panels in the generation space. You can obviously sub solar panels for, hydroelectric dams or, nuclear stacks or any other, assets that you have for generation that normally would require somebody to erect scaffolding or to repel down the side of something and get harnessed up.

So I think there's tremendous value no matter which, area of the utility you're in.

Okay. So I'm back. I had to do a quick two factor authentication to, log in there.

But it looks like we've got some, some markers that have shown up here, and, we're gonna launch our drone on the roof, and we're gonna go have a look at some of these calls.

Great. So it looks like there are different keep out zones here. We're obviously not needed near an airport.

Yeah. That so the keep out zones here because we're doing reliability testing with, some drones, and they're constantly flying in that orange area over our headquarters.

But as we launch here, you're able to see, kind of our hive on the rooftop. So, I'll have a look down there, and you can see we've got some some docs sitting, collocated. There's our version one doc, and we've got, four or five docs up here. But the first thing we're gonna do is go have a look at a and go have a look at this transformer.

So the PD rates reports that a car hit a three phase pad mount transformer at the northwest corner of building e, and there's no lights out.

So we're gonna go ahead and respond.

I can see that pad mount transformer kinda right here. I'm gonna go ahead and go to a full video view for you.

Alright. So, we've flown over to this transformer. And because it's a nine one one call, typically, you know, the the nine one one calls don't come in associated with the device. So we wanna associate, this call with the device. But just from a, a quick view, wide angle view of the situation, looks like the bollards aren't damaged or anything like that. So, we'll get a little closer and see if we can't clear this call without having to do a truck roll.

Yeah. So I think the main value of the drone is the idea that you can have it go out first and just give you an answer. Is it a real problem or not a problem? And if it is, you can get the magnitude of the problem and right size the response to it.

Yeah. I don't see any exposed cable or any damage to the bollards or even any car tracks. So, we may reach back out to PD to make sure, that this is the right location, but, looks like it's gonna be a t number seven five three six zero. So we'll make a note of that and associate that to this call.

So now we're gonna go have a look at what's our next one? Let me clear it. Let me clear this call up, though.

We're gonna set that to close. So we've cleared that call.

Let's go look at Christina, which one do you wanna see next?

Do we take a look at, switch one two three?

Okay. We're gonna go fly over to switch one two three. It looks like they're showing we're showing customers out behind the, UD riser switch X-ray one two three. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit respond there, and, we're we're gonna be able to see the pillar show up over that, location and the aircraft moving that way.

I'm gonna declutter our view just a little bit and clear up some of the, the street names.

Alright. So we're here.

There's our switch pole there. Looks like it's, transmission under build. So or distribution under build on a transmission pole. So we're gonna ease ease up to it, and then we're gonna descend down so we can get towards the distribution level.

I think we have a couple questions coming in.

When we talk about the altitudes that we're flying, particularly earlier you were flying over the solar panels. Mhmm.

Do you remember what altitudes we were flying and how close we could get to them?

We can get within one meter of the solar panels. There's like a one meter bubble around the aircraft.

At that time, or I guess at that, particular, mission, we were flying about seventy feet over the panels.

Maybe a little less. I didn't really oh, we've got a open switch there that we can see, and we've got a closed switch. Let me see if I can't get a little better view of it. We're still pretty far away.

I'm gonna go back into that crawl mode.

There we go. And I'm gonna ease up to the pole and descend as we as we go.

So I think another, kind of contrast to point out is that, when we were flying in Fort Collins, Colorado, the, the density altitude there was around six thousand feet. And, here, our density altitude is probably around a hundred because we're pretty close to sea level here. But, but we can operate in both of those environments.

I think we're running out of two different docks, here because we're in two different locations. But, Corey, how long is our battery life, on our x ten?

So that depends on your performance, but, but we advertise about thirty nine minutes, of flying outside the dock. So we can see here in this switch that we've got, we've got a switch open. It looks like a solid blade bypass or solid blade disconnect. And this isn't a real critical problem or not anything I would ever send anybody out for, but, when the the next time this fuse blows on this, this cutout, we'll probably change that door out, because we've got some, exposed fiberglass there.

But, I'll go ahead and make a note of that so that we can kind of keep an eye on it, when we do our next rounds.

Sure. And so we're gonna go up and have a look at this pull top as well.

Yeah. This is pretty tall. I think this would be a real pain to get somebody out there to just do an inspection to look at the top of the pull.

Oh, yeah. I mean, in this location, this would most likely have to be climbed or or there would be, like, a lot of customer environmental impact by getting a truck in there and, you know, tearing up the landscaping or whatever. But we can see if there's a real need to get a truck there by just, flying up and having a look at the top of the pole. So let's see if I can get a little closer to it.

So both from the effort and a safety perspective, I think there's a real value in getting an aerial view, particularly because poles, rot typically occurs at the top of the poles.

Yeah. And it looks like, there's there's no pole cap on this.

I don't know. I can't remember if that's the standard here or not, but it looks pretty good to me. It's probably something we keep track of, as we're looking. You know, we'll we'll snap a photo of it here and we'll be able to, check it out, as time goes on to, see the rate of change.

I think different utilities have different standards. As you said, a poll cap can be required for one and not for another. But I think also we know that, the climate is changing. We're seeing an increase, in weather patterns that will increase the wear and tear on our assets. So it might be something to take note of, in terms of, whether that is something that we want to add, to our inventory.

Yeah. So I've got one more call. Do you wanna go look at this, other pole out here? It's a steel pole that was hit by a car at the corner of Clearview in West Hillsdale.

Sure.

Alright. I'm gonna go ahead and respond to that.

And this, what's happening now is all autonomous. We've just, selected the call, location and just click respond. And so the drone that we're operating is able to, fly out to this location, And then we're gonna have a good look at these polls. Again, we're gonna grab a, asset number, see if we can't get an asset ID tag, to allow us to associate this call with an account.

So how far are we right now from the poll? It looks like you're zooming in.

We're a ways from it. I'm not really sure. We can look on the map and get an get an idea. Hold on. Let me change.

So I think what's nice is that we have options. We could get all the way up to the poll if we wanted to and have confidence that we're not going to hit it. But at the same time, we don't necessarily have to be so close, and near anybody, and we could get a pretty crystal clear asset ID even from further away.

Yeah. We're across a four lane road, I guess, and we're maybe four times the distance across a four lane road, here where we're at right now. But that's keeping us inside, like, on our campus and inside our our, keep in area that you can see with the green line there.

Well, Christina, I think we've finished here. Do you wanna, go ahead and I'll return the drone to the dock, and we can see if we can answer some questions here.

Yeah. That sounds great.

I think one of the things we also wanted to show today, we had clear and sunny weather in California and a little bit of light rain in Colorado. But, one of the things I wanted to show was a little video, that shows what the dock can do and what the drone can do in more extreme weather conditions. So maybe we could get that up as we get our questions together.

So you can see here, this is some of the testing that we have done here at Skydio so that you can see even in extreme heat, in a fair amount of rain, heavy rain and wind, and in snow and some zero conditions that the dock is fully operational.

And this is actually a really fun video. This these are the docks on top of our rooftop at our headquarters, and you can see on a very windy day, you can see some rain, you can see the flag moving. The drone is actually coming in to land, and you can see that it's correcting itself with the physics models that are embedded in the AI on the drone in order to make that landing even though there is a fair amount of wind. So you can see this one right in front of us really kind of battling it out in order to stay on trajectory and land on its landing pad. And once it does land, then, the dock is going to initiate closing to bring these levers in to put the drone centered in the right place before the hood comes back over. So we are really proud of oh, yes. Now you can see the flag really, really blowing, but we're proud of what this drone can do out there in real life conditions.

So alright. We have some really good questions here. I think if we recap, we can see that, we've been able to do a lot today. We looked at generation.

So we looked at some solar assets. We're able to, identify some cell level defects. I think that helps that helps me as an asset manager, to understand, what maintenance I need to do and what parts and equipment I need to order, to be able to get those work orders out there. We were also able to see the tops of poles and switches that were on these poles, and even peek into some substations.

So, the assets that you can look at are limitless, by doing remote operations, and we can also see that Corey can operate drones in two different locations, really while sitting in his office chair.

So, for a couple of these questions, are there keepout zones are these keepout zones automated, or do you need to manually define them every time?

That's part of the dot commissioning process. You would, define your keepout zones, based on, you know, custom needs, whether you, your your drone operation policy might keep, keep you from flying over, say, a distribution bus or something like that. You could, have the drone keep out of the distribution bus, but they could get closer to the transmission bus due to the, you know, greater clearances there. So it's all custom. You can customize it any way you want.

Great.

And how does the launch pad work with snow? So does somebody need to go out there and clear it before the flights? Is the drone stored there all year round?

Yeah. The the drone is there year round. It is heated and cooled to maintain optimal, battery health, so to to maintain that battery chemistry.

It has a heater and cooler installed, and it also has the ability to melt snow from the rooftop and, and make it so that the drone can operate in, in pretty much, you know, in various weather conditions.

Great. And how do these drones handle GPS denied or low connectivity environments during these autonomous inspections?

So so in a GPS denied environment or or a low connectivity environment, there there's a couple of opt options you can use.

We have the ability to, set a time limit that the drone would, say, go, would disconnect. So if if the drone disconnected and I wanted to, wait a minute, but, you know, allow the drone to reconnect, then, then we could do that, or we could have the drone immediately return home.

We could have the drone even backtrack its, its approach path, as it returns to make sure that, you know, it's going, in a in a safe, path as it returns to the dock.

Great. And I think we talked about Colorado and how there was an airport. So can you see incoming aircraft that are broadcasting their position in the map view?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I forgot I forgot to mention that. And, but, yes, we have ADS BN on the dock, and what that does is it funnels, real time, data, into the cloud environment so that the operator can make real time decisions.

Great. And when creating missions, do you pick an area to inspect and then the software picks the most efficient route, or do you manually program them yourself?

You could do both. You could manually program an inspection mission, or you could create a polygon, like over the PV plant that we were looking at. You could create a polygon, and then, the drone would, would determine the the best path it needed to take to cover that whole polygon, and solar map.

Great. Regarding the augmented reality, can the AR ingest GIS data with structure numbers displayed in real time on screen as points?

No. We can't do that with, with AR currently, but we're working on, custom map layers that will be able to, you can take your GIS data. And then on the map view, you would be able to see your asset data, lines, switches, poles, that kind of thing.

Yeah. And I have a really interesting question, and I think we can deep dive a little bit on b v loss for those who don't have as much background in it. Someone asked, how do you maintain visual line of sight while you're remote, which inherently, we do not have visual line of sight, for what we're here.

And is this type of flight only allowed by the FAA for emergencies?

No. So so that's a great question. So, the, our waiver parameters for where we're operating we had a waiver for or we have a waiver from the FAA to operate with no visual line of sight on the aircraft. And what that does is it comes with different parameters based on the location and the risk level. In this location, we were limited to two hundred feet maximum, over over the ground. Excuse me.

And then, we had to ensure that when we transitioned across the road that there was no moving traffic. So it depends on your site, but, Skydio's regulatory team has been very successful with, with getting our customers, you know, the waivers they need to really, unlock the true value of the dock, for their use case.

Yeah. I think that's a really important call out because it's one thing to buy the equipment and be able to use the equipment. It's it's another thing to be in compliance with it, and have the waivers that you need to be allowed to fly it. So, another related question, which you may have half answered, what is needed to fly BVLOS?

So to fly BBLAS, you need a waiver, and, some specialized equipment that comes with the dock. So the dock's been built and designed with the idea that that it would be operated in a beyond visual line of sight mode.

So, so as you, start your journey with Skydio, we'll do some site assessments, do some figuring out, and then do some analysis on your GIS data, and then apply for or or help you apply for a waiver. And then once your waiver is awarded, we'll do the best to, to train you up on the waiver and then, have you operate it.

And I think what's exciting is there are so many utilities now that have been granted, various b v loss waivers. I think the FAA is very familiar with, Skydio and our remote operations, for utilities. So the way has already been paved, so it's not an impossibility or something that's nascent at this point in time.

As far as the data goes, Corey, what happens to the feed, after the mission?

So the data that's captured by the sensor, can be pushed different places. So the ReadyLink is one place.

We have a pretty extensive API suite, with Skydio Cloud that allows you to push the data feeds into third party AI solutions like Levitas for, kinda on the edge analysis.

But, ultimately, once the drone lands, it's going to upload. It's gonna charge the aircraft, and it's gonna upload all of the data that was captured to the Skydio cloud. And then, there's a lot of different, you know, API connections that can be made from the cloud to get it into your asset management system or get it, you know, into your Esri instance or whatever it is that you use.

Great.

I think we'll take two more questions. So what are the requirements for a dock site? So as far as power, space, surface, surroundings?

It it depends on the application, but, but but it you would be very hard pressed to find a substation that didn't have room to, install a dock, and then you would just pull station service power over to it and then, have some connectivity. So, basically, all you need for a dock is power and connectivity.

About, I think it's I I can't remember the exact number, but, I can have somebody reach back out to the person that asked that question about, more specifics on their site and, and placing docs, you know, according to their use case.

Awesome. And last question we'll take today for the sake of time. Are there any latency concerns with flying from such a distance?

It depends on your connectivity.

I think we are running around eighty or ninety milliseconds of latency there. I didn't have the connectivity pulled up, but it was pretty snappy and responsive as I was giving it inputs.

So, I didn't really notice latency, but it's important to have a a good, backhaul there. And our, new radio that we've got and the Skydio Fusion allows us to seamlessly transition between a five g connect connected aircraft and a Skydio Link connected aircraft. So, I don't I forgot to mention it when we were out there, but when we flew down to the substation, I think we've trend we may have transitioned over to, cellular. I couldn't see or didn't really notice it. But, but, yeah, it it depends on your connectivity.

Yeah. Well, I think we are about out of time. Any of the questions that were put in the chat that were not answered, somebody will take note of this and actually reach out to answer your questions. So, fear not if you drop something in there. We really appreciate everybody joining us today, and we're really excited to talk about the value of operationalizing technologies such as drone and remote operations in the utility space. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you all.