February 29 notes from (ISC)² (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC2) meeting I attended (remotely) in Long Island, New York (joint meeting with New York City chapter).
No new information - just additional context and a live demonstration.
♦ Defence/Large Commercial/Critical Infrastructure/Law Enforcement are the key markets.
♦ It is a proprietary drone made here in the US, with a proprietary base-station also made here in the US, and the C4-AI proprietary software coded in Silicon Valley. The entire technology stack is proprietary.
♦ Computing is done both on the drone and in the base-station. There is a server inside the base-station. It's all edge-based computing - all data is stored on the base station for cyber security reasons - it never communicates with the cloud (unless the customer wants an exception).
♦ The drones would ideally work in a lot of 100 to 1000 (a swarm) controlled by an individual pilot (e.g. southern border perimeter given as an example). They need to be smart enough to coordinate between themselves and minimise human intervention. As an example of multi-drone operations, if one drone is low on battery, another one can take over mid-flight and send the first one back to base to recharge. The system is able to automatically select the most qualified drone for each specific mission based on parameters (like battery life, proximity to the target/incident, weather conditions). There is also single beam LiDAR and an altimeter to prevent crashing and avoid obstacles.
♦ Flew a live drone mission using their software from a hotel room in Albuquerque, New Mexico controlling a drone located in Silicon Valley, California. This is where I forgot to take notes because it was incredibly impressive and I was kind of blown away.
(20min delay)