Autonomy unleashed on land, sea, and air: How drones revolutionize readiness
Learn how autonomous drones are redefining the standards of readiness and maintenance across the most demanding environments— be it sea, air, or land.
This session showcases cutting-edge examples of how the Skydio drone ecosystem, with partners like Qii.AI and Lockheed Martin, is enhancing the longevity and operational readiness of massive infrastructure, from aircraft and ships to critical land-based equipment.
Discover how digital twin technology, combined with advanced inspection, remote operations, and modeling capabilities, reduces manpower and inspection times by up to 90% while simultaneously improving accuracy and safety. See cross-industry applications of this technology, with impact not just in large-scale commercial operations, but in base defense, perimeter security, and beyond.
Learn more about Skydio for Defense
- Uh, good morning, everyone. Michael Cohen, I'm the founder of Key.ai.
- Um, I named the company, everyone calls it Q-A-I.
- Um, it's a Toronto-based ten-year-old company
- that, uh, decided
- through its services journey with drones, uh,
- to solve a data problem. So about seven years of development,
- uh, right about April 2020, we launched a virtual inspection platform
- called Key.ai. We like to focus on artificial
- intelligence, uh, computer vision, largely into twoD
- imagery. We work in threeD, but largely twoD.
- Um, and our focus is corrosion problems, which really sort of coating
- breakdown through to staining, through to, uh, full-blown
- corrosion. And then we work on concrete problems as
- well.
- Uh, we get up these days to work with the
- Royal Canadian Navy,
- uh, who's got a f- uh, fleet that's really end of
- life. They're trying to restore it, deploy it very, very quickly,
- turn it around.
- And corrosion, of course, they sit on-- at water, at sea,
- so corrosion's a huge issue. And we've been using Skydio to be able
- to data acquire the key platform to model and
- then quantify, literally measure by, uh, square meter,
- uh, the amount of staining or corrosion on the ship, produce reports,
- give it to labor, uh, for remediation.
- And I'm thrilled to be here with this panel and all of you.
- Hi, I'm Larry Wexels. I'm the Senior Manager for Artificial
- Intelligence at our
- Lockheed Martin Aeronautics business area, uh, responsible for a lot of the
- strategy and, uh, various different projects that we have.
- Uh, so let me ask by a show of hands, how many of you flew here today?
- Maybe not today, this week.
- All right. So, um, how many of you actually went out
- and did an inspection of the
- aircraft before you got on the aircraft?
- You did? Wow. I knew there'd be one. There had to be one. All right.
- So if you think about that, you have a lot of trust in the system
- that's already there. And the maintainers that are out there,
- they're
- working to try to make sure that these, these aircraft are inspected, that every
- bolt is tightened, every system is checked out.
- And they're putting their life at risk in a lot of ways, and we'll talk about that
- in a little bit. Um, one of the challenges with that
- is they're,
- they're, they're, you know, at high levels, I mean, there
- are certain aircraft
- of maybe five, six stories in the air, and they're on a cherry picker, so it's a
- pretty big deal for them to do inspections.
- And that's not only for the military side, which we're involved in, uh, but also
- the commercial side of that. So we'll talk a little bit about
- that today, and, uh,
- that's kind of what our focus is, is doing autonomous aircraft inspections,
- and
- even beyond that, uh, we'll, we'll hit on some of those subjects.
- Awesome. And then John Montague is here from our solutions engineering
- team.
- Uh, for those who-- of you who have other problem sets for
- maintenance and, and
- inspection and want a demo and can really see what the drone can do,
- John's team is
- out in the field, uh, looking at customer problems and,
- and how Skydio drones can
- solve those on a day-to-day basis. So John,
- maybe a quick intro from you as well.
- Yeah. So, uh, like Chris gave me the, the intro there, but, um, I've been in the
- drone solutions business for about fifteen years, worked at a competitor to
- Lockheed for a while as an engineer.
- Um, but we're starting to see this technology
- come together, and these workflows
- that we're gonna talk to today is really tying it together for
- inspections and
- ultimately for fleet readiness. So like, uh, Chris said, my team is all over the
- globe, um,
- bringing Skydio assets out there, doing demos, working with, uh,
- customers to try
- to understand their problem set and how we can enable them.
- Um, and a lot of times it is workflows with partners and,
- and others.
- Um, and we do, just a quick plug, we do have a,
- a multi-ship collaborative autonomy demo happening two thirty to four thirty today.
- It's gonna be on repeat. So come and see us.
- We're-- it's, it's on south side, kinda closer to the big tent from earlier.
- But yeah, if you wanna interact with us there,
- you'll get to see some pretty cool
- stuff. So yeah.
- All right. Great. Let's jump into it.
- So we're, we're gonna kinda jump into a few use
- cases.
- So we're gonna try to shape the problem, current state of affairs, and then what
- these two gentlemen are doing within their industry teams to,
- to make things more
- automated, more safe, uh, more predictable, um, uh,
- more accessible, and, and improve downstream analytics within
- these spaces.
- So over to you guys.
- Larry?
- All right. So, um, today we're gonna, we're gonna go through kind of the process
- that we use at, at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics to,
- to do our aircraft
- inspections. Um, so there's a lot of benefit from doing
- this, and actually
- if you go to the next chart,
- there should be, um, one more.
- Okay. So AiR, it's our autonomous AI-enabled capability.
- We're using a Skydio drone. We have a, an ecosystem that, that is more
- than just drone-based, but the drone is the predominance right now of what
- we're
- using. Uh, Skydio just provides a phenomenal solution
- to us with
- its threeD scan capability, so we can basically go point to an asset
- that we
- wanna scan, tell it to go, go around and do that scan.
- It takes all the imagery that we need, and it's fed through our artificial
- intelligence pipeline. We'll walk through that in a minute.
- But the reason why this is important, if you go to the next slide, please.
- Aircraft inspections today can be very-- a very challenging
- environment. I, I don't know if this is a build.
- It should have had a ring of... Next slide. There you go. Okay. All right.
- So it can be very time-consuming. It's not only from the process of an
- inspector doing the inspection visually, it's also for the
- equipment movement. There's potential, um, uh, cherry pickers that you
- may need, as you can see here, getting to the tail of, of aircraft
- that are six
- stories in the air. Uh, you also have, um, maintenance stands that are
- moved around, and there's a lot of infrastructure
- that comes with doing, uh, asset
- inspections. It could also be costly.
- Again, you've got that support staff, but it's also the equipment that's
- necessary to do a lot of those inspections.
- Inducing damage, uh, one of the big keys there is
- you're moving maintenance stands around, and you're protect- potentially running
- into an aircraft, which happens more often than you think.
- Um, and then you also have, um, walking on the surface of a wing
- or other surfaces where you're potentially kicking antennas, uh, or other,
- other asse-- other things on the aircraft surface that,
- um, would, would cause
- additional damage. Hazardous inspectors, and this is a big one.
- Uh, so, you know, I'm aware of many stories of any-anywhere
- from people falling off a wing and winding up in a wheelchair, spinal
- injuries, broken arms, uh, from falling off of assets, so it's a very
- big deal in that area. And if we can use a drone rather
- than have a person doing that initial inspection and to minimize
- the amount of time they have to do on, on those type of a-assets is very
- important. Sizable logistics footprint, we've talked about that, so the, the
- cherry pickers and scaffolding and anything like that that's necessary.
- Uh, inconsistent outcomes. So if I gave everyone in this, in this
- audience here today, um, that maintenance task of going to do an
- inspection, assuming you all had-- were qualified to do it, you would all
- still probably come up with a slightly different solution.
- So this provides consistency that's reliable in how we're doing the
- inspections. And then adverse mission rate impact.
- So the whole reason we have aircraft out there, uh, from a military side,
- obviously we have missions to perform, uh, is to get those aircraft back in the
- air as fast as possible. For the commercial side, um, none of us
- like sitting at the airport. I felt bad on the way here.
- The flight next to me, they all were sitting,
- waiting for maintenance to come and
- do, do an inspection. And actually it was an inspection they had to do, um, and
- apparently they got scrubbed. So lots of issues can come from that,
- and it can
- impact, um, not only cost for airlines and,
- and other things there.
- So Larry, real quick-
- Yeah
- ... um, just because this, this idea's been around for a while,
- and I just know
- what we had to go to to get all the safety approvals to utilize a small
- drone flying around assets that cost 10 of millions--
- tens of millions of
- dollars, uh, and the damage that could be caused to those expensive
- assets.
- So [clears throat] maybe just walk everybody through the process you had to
- go
- through, why Skydio was a better solution, and kind of allowed you to get
- over some of those safety hurdles and approvals to be able to kind of move
- forward
- within this space and do this more automated inspection
- using drones.
- Yeah, absolutely. So the big thing there is-- Well,
- there's two, two primary
- things that, that make Skydio better than any other
- drone out there, in our
- opinion. So it's the obstacle avoidance capability,
- phenomenal capability. Uh, we've, we've done extensive testing
- on it and, and are a believer of the capability.
- Um, and then also the 3D scan. So we basically are able
- to fly for a very short period of time, and we're able to take and
- tell the, the drone, "Go do an autonomous scan." It flies
- around the airpa-- uh,
- aircraft. We stick the controls in the hands of
- users when they come out,
- and, uh, we do demos for them or go out in the field,
- and they instantly hit the
- I believe button because of the, the, the Skydio tech behind it.
- Great. Thank you.
- Sure. All right, so I'll quickly
- walk you through the inspection process itself.
- So, uh, we do the data collection using, again, the, the 3D
- scan capability from Skydio. Uh, and it-- Right now I'm talking a lot
- about aircraft, but we can go beyond aircraft.
- So we've been asked to look at dry dock submarines, um, missiles,
- the Orion space capsule, various different things.
- If it needs to be visually inspected, you can use our core engine, uh,
- our core AI pipeline to do those inspections.
- Uh, so we, we do the scan using Skydio.
- We take the imagery that's captured and do a reconstruction.
- Um, so if you're familiar with photogrammetry,
- we're basically taking all the
- imagery that we capture and creating a 3D model.
- That is then overlaid onto our, our, uh, model that we have of the
- actual aircraft, and we use AI to identify any defects.
- So whether it's corrosion, uh, paint chips, or
- different characteristics that can impact our low observable
- surfaces,
- uh, stealth, if you will, those are all included in,
- in how we're doing our
- assessments there. Uh, then we characterize them.
- So we'll tell you various different things about the, the, the, uh, defect that
- shows up, the type of defect it is, the size of the defect, and then
- that's all relayed onto a three-dimensional model that's available
- to maintainers
- and can be integrated into a maintenance system.
- So that's kind of a fast walk through the inspection process.
- Sorry. [laughs] Pass it. So I think one thing too, and I--
- 'cause I've, I've worked
- with you, and my team's worked with you a little
- bit, that I find pretty
- interesting, um, on the data collection side, I think,
- you know, a lot of...
- There's different aircraft obviously, and, and you're looking at a lot of different
- aircraft, um, with this. But, like, the 3D scan setup,
- for those not familiar with
- 3D scan, is, is very basic, and you can be trained in a matter of
- minutes.
- I think there's, in the future as we're talking,
- a lot of repeatability, where you
- can optimize the, the flight path, optimize the look angles,
- things like that,
- which, you know, brings us into some of our mission
- planning capability with, with
- the dock systems you, you heard about today.
- Um, but maybe you can talk a little bit about
- how 3D scan, the, the
- setup, the, the flight aspect. I mean, I think it's--
- In my-- Non-Skydio drones doing 3D scanning
- missions
- is, is a much more complicated task than I
- think a lot of people realize, and it--
- that's a, a good enabler, as you mentioned.
- Absolutely. So yeah, the 3D scan capability makes it very easy
- for us
- to basically set a few presets in the, in the system, tell it
- to go scan, and it does what it needs to do.
- So it-- We have the, the overlap set, the offset from the aircraft
- that gives us the degree of accuracy we're looking for, uh, the solution, and
- ultimately, that, that path makes it just super easy the way
- you guys have
- architected it. So yeah.
- I think that's it. Yeah.
- All right. Uh, Michael, over to you to talk about ship inspection.
- Okay. Uh, I, uh, I feel like everything Larry
- just said I could probably say about ships.
- Um, so maybe I'll speak a little bit more
- broadly about this.
- The, um, the program run in Canada starts with the
- federal government.
- Uh, they've got what they identify as 19 key
- industrial
- capabilities, and two of those capabilities would be
- RPass
- and artificial intelligence. And I'm willing to bet that almost every
- Western government, in terms of their key industrial
- capabilities, have probably
- i-identified those.
- In the United States, ship-based corrosion for your armed
- forces is about a six billion dollar problem annually.
- About 300 ships, which probably puts the US problem of
- corrosion at the budget of a lot of other nations for their
- entire military.
- Um-
- Force multiplier now, of course, as deployment's critical,
- uh, to the Middle East and to other areas around the world.
- So the mission for us is to get to be able to participate in a
- large group,
- to be able to turn around the ship at port and get it redeployed as quickly
- as possible.
- Um, and that's a, a really, uh, time-consuming thing that we're trying
- to build efficiencies in.
- So starting with robotics, with Skydio makes a lot of
- sense.
- And then moving on to AI, of course, makes a lot of sense.
- We like to say in our shop that AI won't replace you,
- but someone using AI
- will replace you. And so we make the pitch that,
- well, traditional methods would be things like
- ladders and bows and chairs and
- notepads and engineers walking around the ship.
- Could you imagine if someone deployed a drone, grabbed imagery, and from
- the comfort of their office or even home, were able to
- do an analysis not in days, but rather in hours, and how
- that would affect
- labor downstream?
- Couple of problems emerge in which, uh,
- the Skydio platform was really the only solution that we could
- bring. Uh, one, we needed to take engineers that
- were corrosion analysis
- engineers and make them pilots. So that's a bit of a journey.
- They need to get a regulatory approval just like anywhere else.
- Uh, but they need to be comfortable enough to
- be able to learn an autonomous system
- and then fly it.
- It's really amazing to me when you get into the defense sector
- that these are
- people that operate some of the most sophisticated equipment around the world.
- They catapult jets, they fire huge guns, they're,
- you know, top tier in the pyramid of complexity
- and expertise
- in mechanicals, but then you show them a, you know, lightweight drone, and they
- say, "Absolutely not. We're not flying that around." I mean,
- they fly F-35s,
- but put a drone around a ship and they're, "No, thanks." So that's a little bit of
- a challenge. So the technology has to be incredible to
- bring on site.
- And then ships,
- uh, if you can imagine a ship, they are incredibly complex,
- um, vehicles. Uh, guy wires, masts,
- uh, lots of in, entry points, exit points, uh,
- dissimilar surfaces. So being able to fly
- around a ship would be an incredibly complex...
- I, I draw an analogy to a building facade,
- one out of ten, ship, nine out of ten in, in terms of complexity.
- So the risk model to take non-aviation people, make
- them aviation people, uh, and then try and image a
- ship with such resolution that you can perform computer vision on it
- requires an incredibly high degree,
- uh, of autonomy. Then you've got the pier and other things.
- There's always people around. You've got to be over top of people.
- People are on the pier. And so the entire risk profile of the
- activity, uh, tends to be really quite high.
- Yeah. So we're talking physical attributes,
- but there's a high EMI environment as
- well. We'll take radars out of the equation
- because that's a little bit more
- complicated. So being able to have confidence
- that your solution's not
- gonna fall out of the air or have connectivity issues in a high EMI
- environment as
- well outside of the complicated physical structures that reside on a ship, I
- think kind of twofold there, uh, with being able to use the visi- the
- vision navigation in the lead to be able to mitigate any EMI interference
- and continue to conduct your scan.
- Absolutely. Y- you know, I, um, uh, I'm twenty-eight years of my aerospace
- career, twenty in manned. Now, this, uh, in, in unmanned...
- Manned aviation's done a marvelous job of learning from errors.
- My sense,
- uh,
- if you dropped a, a drone around a Navy vessel,
- that's probably the end
- of your program, I think.
- Yeah. I think that's probably right.
- Which, you know, higher barrier to entry, similar to what we talked about with
- aircraft inspection. There has to be high confidence for safety
- approvals to be
- able to, to operate these small drones around
- equipment.
- Well, Navy vessels even more expensive than most
- aircraft, uh,
- which is, I think, why we've, we've had success moving into this space
- where others
- have not been able to.
- All right.
- I think I'd absolutely agree with that, Chris. Yeah.
- All right. Do you wanna move into the rest of your
- presentation or...?
- I didn't know I had a presentation, but-
- Okay, here we go. So we're gonna talk about...
- [audience laughing]
- I really didn't. They gave me a flight itinerary-
- Yeah.
- -and I'm, and I'm here now.
- [laughs] So we're, w- w-
- Why don't I talk about the process a little bit-
- Go ahead. That'd be great.
- -because it's really the... At the end of the day,
- you've got to work backwards.
- Uh, so I'm gonna go a little bit on to where
- our value prop is
- rather than just the technology. I really see that the, you know, sort of,
- uh, A to M is a, a Skydio product in this, and then the N to Z is, is
- a software platform. And really what anyone really wants
- is a report.
- So what we do is, um, we consult
- in a little bit, but the Navy s- essentially scans their
- own ships. Uh, what they would like to do is do, uh,
- pre-remediation, that's a diagnosi- diagnostic
- phase. Then during labor, which is really quite complicated actually
- in our space because the amount of material that you
- purchase for paint,
- for coating breakdown, for staining and corrosion,
- if I could invite you into my
- world, is really quite different.
- And while you may conceive of, of a patch of staining being right beside
- a
- patch of corrosion, if the labor crosses over, then we've,
- we've got a problem
- of budget, we've got a problem of time.
- So having highly specific areas identified for
- each problem.
- Um, once we scan it, we bring it in from three-D scan into our
- platform. We use a three-D digital twin through
- photogrammetry like three-D
- scan,
- uh, allowing the user to click on any part of
- the ship and then access two-D.
- And then from two-D, we deploy algorithms in
- that make suggestions.
- We work a little bit like Grammarly.
- So making suggestions on your grammar, we suggest here is a
- segmented portion of corrosion, we think it's half a meter squared,
- and then we
- have a human in the loop. Almost everything we do is confirmed
- by an engineer. And then, of course, those results I'll get
- quantified, put into a report, and then the report gets
- segmented,
- uh, by remediation. So if you want to produce a report on the
- helicopter deck that has paint only in certain
- areas, that would be specified by the exact
- location,
- uh, on the ship. They actually divide ships by half-meter
- frames.
- Uh, and then the remediation of paint, prep paint and, and,
- uh, uh, and finish is attached to the
- report, and then that's our business.
- So that's a workflow from a drone flight right to report.
- I hope that's helpful.
- Yeah. One thing we, we talked about before starting the panel
- is obviously we're,
- we're kind of talking about phase one on how to apply this
- technology to maintenance and inspection.
- So that's for ongoing maintenance or predictive maintenance
- and solving problems
- here now. I think the other thing that the industry is lacking
- is just archival
- information to show degra- degradation over time, um,
- that went into c- current ship design that can be used to f- uh, inform
- future ship design or future aircraft design,
- whether that's materials, layup
- methods, um,
- uh, paint schemes, uh, corrosion, um, mitigation techniques, things
- like that. So I... We, we see this kind of long-term being a
- phase one
- approach where we're really trying to solve the time now ongoing maintenance
- problem, automate those inspections, and make them, um,
- easier and more predictive for, for doing predictive maintenance
- potentially
- underway for ships in particular, but then also informing future ship or
- aircraft design to make them more resilient in the future.
- Well, well, Chris, let me make you... You're absolutely right.
- L- let me make the point this way. This is a patrol vessel that's shown on our
- platform on the left, the three D model on the, on the left,
- and then the users
- clicked and accessed, uh, the two D imagery on the right.
- Um, prior to this model, the way that the engineers would work would be on
- a CAD that's held in a PDF. So ship's probably, I think
- its manufacture date's about nineteen eighty-seven.
- So
- all the archives
- on this ship from the build. One, one, the shipbuilder may not even have given
- over the CAD. Uh, but two, what the engineers today in two thousand
- twenty-four have at their fingertips is a CAD.
- So thinking through all this and, and where you guys in the leading edge of
- these, um, detections off of inspections done with
- three D scans and
- other, other methodology, tying together a little bit what we heard
- today with, um,
- the X10 for dock and then the on-premises solutions that we're bringing for
- our government customers. Can you describe what you see the vision
- is for the
- future? Um, whether it's higher efficiency,
- whether it's, um, more remote
- operations or with the lack of labor that's trained and
- qualified to fly these drones, maybe it's a, in a, a remote asset
- or a contract or
- something like that. And maybe just see how you think next
- twelve, twenty-four,
- thirty-six or months look like. I'll give it to you first, Larry.
- Yeah. So, um, we are, we're looking at the big picture of,
- of, um, how we can reduce the amount of time
- that the
- maintainers are actually spending on the aircraft.
- And, um, in our testing, it's looking like we can have at least,
- depending on the platform, a tenfold reduction in that time,
- which is,
- uh, pretty phenomenal and, and can really, really, uh, help in the field.
- Uh, from a safety aspect, I mean, there's a lot, lot that can go on there.
- The autonomy aspect of using docks, I think is gonna be very important.
- Uh, so we can-- We're, we're wanting to be able to look and say,
- "Okay, go scan
- this aircraft," where we don't have to do all those presets for three D scan and,
- and things, and it goes out and just does it for us.
- Uh, so it's a big picture vision there.
- Um, Chris, you had mentioned the historical aspect.
- Looking back and seeing what an aircraft looked like before,
- um, uh, maybe certain maintenance was done on, on the
- aircraft is also very important. Uh, depending on the type of aircraft we're
- looking at, that could become very important to see
- where certain restorations have
- been performed. Uh, so there's a lot of, lot of that that I think is,
- is part of the, the, the, uh, future of what we're doing. Yeah.
- Yeah. What about... I, I guess the other thing w-
- we're hitting on maintenance and
- inspection, but for retrofits back, Michael, to your point, they might not
- have a, a digital twin or a model of, of this
- particular, um, asset. So being able to do a scan,
- then re-render that in CAD and looking at different retrofit,
- if they're putting on
- a new weapon system, if they're putting on, uh,
- additional panels or things like
- that is, are, are things we've seen on the ship side.
- Larry, I don't know if you're seeing that on the aircraft side as well.
- But because there's not a lot of this information databased,
- archived, and accessible, uh, to new either civil engineering or new
- design teams, you know, being able to support the retrofit
- and upgrade process as
- well for assets that are a billion dollars plus in value and,
- and really hard to, to build and, and replace the fleet, uh, is an
- area where we've seen value add as well.
- I think it extends a little bit further.
- So the, I think the, the vision here for sure is, um,
- once you do it once, you probably can do it every month.
- Uh, ships go under enormous amount of damage
- usage, uh, crews on
- and off, those sorts of things. So, so the asset is continually--
- It's fairly dynamic in terms of, um, of the
- usage and even abuse that it takes.
- But when it comes into, into dock, they l-
- You know, any restoration literally becomes a
- construction site.
- Um, scaffolding gets erected on the ship.
- Uh, you've got, uh, sky jacks around, material around, those sorts
- of things. So while you wanna probably get into some
- sort of routine of change detection so that you've got a
- diagnostic, then a remediation, then sort of s-
- some sort of commissioning so you
- understand that the work's been properly, uh,
- performed.
- And you can understand that trend over time
- if you have a baseline, then you've got
- analytics to show you where you're going.
- Um, but I could-- I see
- even a, a, a workplace health and safety f-
- uh, factor where particularly today with the
- drone in the box, um,
- where now not only is your information getting over to
- engineering, but it
- could get over to health and safety, site planning, those sorts of things,
- uh, on the pier, uh, because you're now doing repeatable scans.
- So the force multiplier rolls out to other divisions, I think.
- Perfect. Yeah, John, I don't know if you wanna add anything in terms of what
- you've
- heard in the field during demos in terms of other, other problems or areas where
- customers are focused on this. Obviously, [clears throat] ease and usabi- e- ease
- and ease and usability of the system is, is paramount, especially if we're putting
- this in the hands of sailor, sailors who maybe have, you know,
- three other
- jobs and this is not their primary duty.
- Making it, you know, the ease of use, I think, is, is a big factor for
- being able to really deploy this at scale.
- Yeah. I think sometimes the hardest challenge
- is getting the systems on, on
- vessels. But, um, some of the other use cases, because this,
- this system
- is, you know, a tool that can be used in a lot of different
- ways is, you know,
- quick battle damage assessment or if, you know, uh, there's a
- lot of activity right now and in various parts of the world,
- if there's damage to a
- ship or something, getting, uh, eyes on that as fast as possible,
- having it as
- a, a part of the safety kit. Um, someone that goes man overboard,
- using this as
- an ISR platform in that case. But, you know, the same system can do these,
- these
- different applications. So I think we're seeing a lot of utility,
- um, with our
- naval customers and others, um, Coast Guard, things like that, uh,
- for those types
- of, um, inspections. Even oil, oil inspections, we've done some
- testing recently, um, using our thermal camera to be able to see
- different gr- gradations and variations of, of oil spills.
- So there's a lot of extra utility with these systems when you have 'em in the
- hands of folks that can utilize them.
- Um, and since I have the mic and, and I would be a,
- a poor solution engineer if I
- didn't ask this. What's, for both of you, what's at least one thing you'd like to
- see Skydio, uh, do better? Uh, an opportunity you see of
- us to improve our product or, or a feature you'd like,
- and we have some engineers
- and, um, product in here, so they'll have to listen. So here you go.
- So I guess before I, before I answer that question, um,
- the... You mentioned battle damage, and one of the big things with battle
- damage
- is sometimes you have chem-bio that may be used.
- So sending, um, an asset out there, you don't wanna send a human out there if
- that's, if that's the case, um, immediately at least.
- And so having a drone be able to do a quick inspection for battle damage is very
- important. And also, um, y- airfield battle
- damage, so that's another application. Facilities inspections.
- Uh, these are all areas that we're, we're looking at our, ourself at Lockheed
- Martin. Uh, but that is, that, that's some of the, the,
- the real deal stuff that I
- think where drones can, can play another, uh, really important use case.
- Now, what can we see, um, in the, in the area of what
- Skydio can improve? Um, we would love to see...
- Well, first of all, the X10, I think, is bringing a great capability with
- accuracy.
- Uh, it's gonna help us have a further standoff
- away from the aircraft, which means
- our inspection speeds will increase. So you're answering the mail on that.
- Um, the ability to change sensors on the X10,
- I think is gonna,
- is gonna be really important for us.
- There are certain sensors we're looking at putting on, on there, and we'd like to
- work with you guys on getting, uh, certain sensor sets put on there.
- So that's a, that I think is a, a critical aspect right now
- that we're looking at.
- Awesome.
- Yeah.
- Uh, at the risk of repeating, um, I don't operate,
- so but what, uh, for our shop, Jonathan,
- uh, the ability to get the asset scanned as
- fast as possible with the
- highest degree of resolution, um, is
- what we wanted at all times. The X10 was a...
- In fact, the X10 has created a really interesting
- problem for me,
- um, because of the resolution. Um,
- we ran on a cybersecurity,
- uh, strategy by which at any
- passerby in the, in the naval shipyard could park their
- car, look
- through the,
- uh, look through the gate and see the ship.
- So that's the level of, of detail that we had with
- the X2.
- Okay.
- No notions of privacy. Public can see the ship.
- Uh, with the X10, now we're reading serial numbers off
- of life rafts from 100 feet. Uh, so
- the entire, our entire cybersecurity, uh,
- profile has changed. But as a c- as a computer
- vision, uh, company, the highest resolution, uh, possible,
- if we could, if we could
- double it, great things happen.
- Great. Uh, you guys wanna open it up to questions in
- the group to see if, if
- anybody has any questions, um,
- kinda more detail on anything?
- Sir.
- I'll be your mic runner for the day, everybody.
- [laughs] Let you go first. Yeah.
- All right. Regarding the military applications, um,
- crap, my question just escaped from me.
- You know what? That's all my fault. I started yakking at you guys.
- Who wants to go next? We'll come back to you.
- That's okay.
- I'll follow on to that. Uh, regarding military applications for,
- uh, aircraft or ships, can you talk about some of the anomalies
- that the
- algorithms would find? Um, get into detail,
- especially interested in low
- observable technology.
- So I can't go into a lot of details on the low observable technology just because
- of the forum we're in right now. Uh, but I'll say that the,
- the general things we
- would be looking for from an LO perspective, we would
- be able to detect. If you can visually see it,
- we can basically train our AI
- algorithms to do that. Um, corrosion, paint issues
- are big things. Cracks are big things we're looking for right now
- in, in all of our
- platforms. But the LO arena, there's definitely more secret sauce
- there. So yeah.
- So Larry, kinda related to that, um, are there any specific things that
- human maintainers typically would miss or you would see error, error va-
- variability across their inspection that you've been able to kinda back
- out, um, or, or mitigate using, using drones?
- Uh-
- Sure. Yeah, so I, I'll give you one example.
- We were, um, at a base and were scanning a
- KC-135,
- and we were on the ground for several hours that day, and we did not see
- a, a corrosion at the top of the tails, probably about two
- inches.
- Um, the maintenance community wasn't even
- aware of it.
- Uh, so we were able to use the technology we
- had to instantly show them what was
- going on there and, and it's because the tail
- is so high you really are not able
- to visually see it that well, especially if you're not- Focused on
- looking for that. So that's just one example of how we've
- been, been able to use
- the tech to find something that could be a pretty critical issue.
- And then that, would that go out as a bulletin to other
- maintainers to look at that
- specific spot more closely when they're doing-
- It could, uh, depending on how, how they're doing their operations, sure.
- Yeah.
- Perfect.
- Yeah.
- I guess this is a question for, for not only the Skydio folk, but also
- for Michael and, and Larry. Um, so from a military
- perspective, and you mentioned...
- You piqued my interest in, uh, in what you said, uh, Michael,
- about privacy
- issue. So to what extent, or have you been engaged in
- developing, designing counter-UAS, uh,
- programs or technologies perhaps?
- And to what extent have you all considered that from a, a user perspective?
- Well, um,
- not at all, sir. Uh, it's just not our business.
- Um, I'll pass the mic in a second, but I do wanna share for this gentleman
- that our, our challenge, we do computer vision and for corrosion.
- But we had a, a Navy observer civilian come on, and he
- wore his best brown-colored sweater
- that was knit the day he was a visual observer that looked just l-
- it was the
- ugliest sweater I've ever seen. [laughs] Looks just like corrosion,
- like it's a, a
- sweater designed to fool computer vision.
- Ships in the background, pure corrosion.
- Everything else is our challenge, just focusing on the ship and, and, uh,
- and those things that could look like corrosion for us is,
- is where we focus our
- science.
- Yeah. So I, I mean, I can't go into any detail on any counter,
- counter-drone
- type work that we would be doing. Obviously, we're, we're a large defense
- contractor, so, uh, there would be some stuff we,
- we could be working on in that
- area. But, um, I don't know if you guys wanna talk more about how
- you're
- avoiding...
- Yeah. So Skydio doesn't have a counter system.
- We're not...
- That's not our business. But we do,
- um, with our, our X10D, and we're, we're building resilience into these
- systems,
- you know, because counter is the,
- i- is the reality in a lot of places in the
- world, and, you know, these systems
- need to be able to operate. So we know a lot about counter systems
- and,
- and things, and that's kinda what I can say unless you
- wanna say more, but...
- [laughs]
- No, I, I think that's fine. Yeah.
- Yeah.
- You wanna counter, counter.
- Correct.
- It's a big space. I don't know- It's a big space.
- It's... Yeah.
- It's a big space.
- Yeah.
- Uh, good day. Um, just a question about the end-to-end
- inspection process,
- especially in an environment where you might need multiple platforms.
- Let's say a ship, you got a drone flying around capturing
- great data now,
- but now you got subsea inspection happening perhaps,
- and there's perhaps nooks and
- crannies where people are walking around with cameras
- or visually doing.
- So how is that world of like, um, uh...
- How is that changing the inspection process, and is it just like late fusion
- of the insights, or is there some sort of three-D scan process
- happening from the
- get-go that can bring everything together no matter what the source was?
- Yeah. Maybe if you guys could talk about-
- Yeah
- ... how you segment the scans to get coverage,
- and then maybe if you utilize the
- AR, AR overlays to make sure you have full
- coverage scan, but kinda how you segment
- over large scans, especially for vessels in particular.
- Um,
- well, that's a great question. And, and for everyone,
- I absolutely do not know this
- gentleman, that our business is just about to go un-
- under the water because
- that's a missing element for ship inspections.
- Corrosion happens, foreign species invasion.
- Uh, contraband actually is a huge issue with ships coming in on
- the civilian side
- of things. Uh, that's a multi-beam sonar and stereoscopic
- on an ROV, so we think that's the evolution.
- You've got a drone above the waterline, you've got an ROV below the waterline.
- Um, and then I think we're well down a path of
- probably three-sixty
- camera on the interior. That tech is actually quite easily--
- uh, is easy and, and deployed today.
- So like Adam showed this morning of sort of an ecosystem to get a holistic
- data set, I think we're right on the verge of that.
- So do you believe these will be like three different inspection reports at the end,
- or you, you bring it all together earlier to write
- one inspection statement?
- So I think it's entirely possible with, um, an RGB sensor
- on top, thermal per- perhaps if you wanted that, uh,
- to mate, um, with millimeter precision a, a
- multi-beam or, or a stereoscopic, uh, point cloud below the
- waterline. I think that's entirely possible.
- And then geosync it with interior would be, would be phenomenal.
- So, and Skydio's right in that ecosystem.
- And from our standpoint, we have an, uh, an ecosystem of sensors that, that
- we've used. The Skydio is one piece of that equation.
- Uh, so Skydio can provide certain level of
- coverage for an aircraft.
- There are certain areas of the aircraft you just can't get to.
- Um, so we're-- we, we are, are... Basically, our roadmap is to use an
- entire ecosystem to, to capture the full digital surface of the
- aircraft to cre- create a digital surface twin.
- Yeah.
- And another question over here.
- Good morning. I'm curious if you, either companies, have done any
- studies to look at a side-by-side comparison of a manual
- inspection versus the automated inspection, and what your level
- of accuracy between the two of them compares, as well as cost time
- and savings analysis between an automated versus
- manual. Which one's more accurate, which one's more cost-effective and
- repeatable?
- Yeah. So, so for the, the aircraft side of the house, uh,
- we've--
- we're running a pilot in, um, Marietta, Georgia at our C-130 production
- plant. That's what Adam talked about this
- morning.
- And, um, we've done comparisons, and the, the accuracy is
- very similar to a human and sometimes even better than that,
- depending on the
- defect we're looking for. Um, so it's absolutely proven itself from that
- standpoint. The, the inspection speed is definitely faster.
- As I mentioned earlier, it just depends on the use case,
- the platform we're
- inspecting, um, and especially with the X10 being able to
- pull off a little
- bit further, uh, we're, we're expecting those speeds to increase
- even more.
- So, um, yeah, I mentioned, uh, we're, we're seeing about a tenfold
- increase in or decrease in, in the inspection speed for some of these
- use cases.
- Yeah, I think depending on the customer, though, is it a time savings thing?
- Is it a readiness, uh, uptime, you know, calibration?
- So I, I think it's-- I think time savings
- is part of the component, but
- readiness and uptime, you know, if we're cutting inspection hours down
- from
- four to eight hours per aircraft to under one hour, I think, you know, there is,
- there's a readiness component of it as well.
- So, uh, the, um,
- variables for us would be on, on a, a ship
- that we would say something like about a, a t- twenty,
- about a sixteen-meter, uh, beam and seventy
- meters long, so fair size battleship.
- Um, probably in the area of five days to walk
- it,
- and we test this all the time with us.
- Uh, about five hours to do it remotely.
- The-- I'll park a-a-accuracy for a second.
- You need one good weather window
- to fly. Actually, probably need a good afternoon weather
- window to
- fly. Noon, high, high sun. Whereas walking it, you probably need
- five good days. You need to transport the people to the
- ship,
- of, of course, 'cause it's highly unlikely, uh,
- we found that the engineers
- are generally in urban centers and not, uh, where the ports are.
- So that whole sort of travel, residence, weather, those sorts of
- things, and then five days to five hours to
- inspect.
- The accuracy, and I'm really surprised to say this as an
- evangelist for our
- company, but the accuracy in the field with people
- with tape measures
- is horrible. Uh, we can do it much more accurately with,
- uh,
- uh, with computer vision, particularly when you're getting into area
- measurements. Uh, like tape measures are just not really, you
- know, uh, very accurate. They say to us, "Well, we need millimeter," and well,
- you've been using a tape measure [chuckles] and a ruler for the last thirty
- years.
- No one's marking millimeters with a ruler.
- So yeah, we're-- A-a-actually, the, the science is pretty strong on, on area
- measurements for, for most use cases.
- And one thing I'll say with, with... It's different than some other drones.
- Um, Skydio, obviously, we have our vision system
- and our obstacle avoidance, so we
- can get very close to things. So if you need that sub-millimeter even level
- with
- the X10 and the sensors, you can get very close to an object
- and take pictures.
- Um, obviously that, that increases, uh, time on station and whatnot, but
- that is an advantage in why Skydio can get in these places is because we can get
- close to objects, and we're not gonna hit them.
- Good question up here.
- Yeah, you kind of, uh, alluded to my, my question around interior captures, and
- do you guys have a solution? You know, exterior, you have a great workflow on,
- but,
- um, kind of can you elaborate on, you know, some of the security risks
- and why,
- what might keep you from doing an interior capture?
- Is that the reason why you guys don't do interiors to the detail that you do
- exterior? Is it a security issue, or is it more a, a feature that's not
- there inside of your current workflow?
- And if you could ask, you know, Skydio or the industry as a whole to create,
- um, you know, a sort of workflow or solution or a piece of hardware to
- attach to,
- you know, the X10, for example, what would that look like
- if you could create a
- perfect sensor for interior capture?
- Well, that's,
- uh, a really good question. I think to get out in front of one part,
- I think
- the Skydio would do interiors. It's a matter of what the volume of the
- interior
- is. So if you've got like a Helo deck or something like that or a large hangar,
- for
- instance, with Larry, I think that's entirely-
- Yeah, it would be-
- ... entirely possible
- ... it would be the volumetric space-
- Yeah
- ... plus lighting.
- Yeah.
- Right? It would be both.
- Yeah. If you're, if you're getting into hallways,
- it's probably, uh, not the right
- tool. Um, uh,
- I'll pass the mic on this. Sir, our, our mission is to be the, the best at
- drone-based corrosion analysis, and so we'll leave the interiors
- to, uh, Sony and others.
- But Larry, um, 'cause security was at one aspect of that question,
- since you
- guys have a very sensitive program, maybe talk about the security
- apparatus and the type of drone that you're using, you know, its offline
- state, why you've been able to get approval to
- use it for the sensitive,
- uh, programs and assets that you've been inspecting.
- That might, that might kind of check the box there as
- well.
- Sure. So, um, we're currently still using the X2D
- and which is the defense
- version. So it has all the right encryption built
- into it.
- It's Blue UAS approved. Uh, we know the, the game is changing a little
- bit on that right now with some of the customers, but, um,
- that's really the, one of the key things that,
- that also brings us to Skydio.
- US-manufactured drone, all that's really important for,
- for the type of
- missions that we do for national security, so.
- Yeah. Maybe to expand on that. So they're conducting the scan.
- They're setting everything up locally.
- There's no external connectivity, and then post-scan, they're pulling
- everything, decrypting everything, pulling it off the SD card locally,
- and it, you
- know, there's no, there's no other transmission, um,
- or external transmission
- beyond that. So they're basically controlling
- their workflow and information from start a scan to end a
- scan to post-process, you know, without, um, any kind of compromise
- in between.
- And I can talk a little bit about, um, the indoor scan.
- So we do have a mode in our thirty scan. It's called indoor scan.
- It's, it's meant to, like in a volume like this, look out,
- and you can look in as
- well. So it really comes down to what size of
- interior.
- So obviously, airplanes and, and ships might be a little small, but,
- um,
- tunnels, uh, bigger, bigger interiors.
- That tent we s- were in earlier today would be fine for
- indoor scan, and all the
- same, um, applications apply, so.
- Yeah,
- of course.
- Just a quick follow-up. Um, I'm in the construction industry,
- and so we're seeing
- more and more clients, um, just adhere to some of the ITAR
- regulations,
- some of the other government regulations that you typically is reserved for,
- you know, clients like yourselves.
- But we're seeing that more in the private sector where
- clients are adopting those
- types of regulations. So, um, that was kind of the, the point of the,
- the question
- around security. So thank you.
- You mean the clients on their own are enforcing-
- Correct. Some of, some of our clients, their, their, their data security,
- you know,
- we're as building interior, exterior, so they're adopting some of the
- more stringent regulations that, you know, are typically reserved for your
- ships, your, your aircraft inspections.
- But we're seeing that like in the data center world
- and some of the other areas in
- construction, so.
- Any other questions, folks?
- Hi. Yeah, so former helicopter maintainer.
- Um, so I know how to calibrate a ruler, but how do I calibrate an
- AI system in my tool shop?
- Yeah, so I mean, the way... I, I, I won't go into a lot of detail on this,
- but to say that the way we do our models, it allows us to
- align, uh, the coordinate system.
- So when we give you a defect, we're telling you in aircraft coordinates.
- So fuselage, station, waterline, buttline coordinates.
- We're also telling you the size of the, the defect.
- So all of our models have that built into it.
- It relays that onto a three-dimensional model where you can actually pull that up.
- You pull up the three-D model, can mouse around it,
- and then point to the defect
- that it's showing, and it'll pull up that two-dimensional picture that it took,
- and
- you could see what, what the dimensions of
- that particular defect were in, in
- aircraft coordinates. Yeah.
- Uh, we do a couple of things. Um, we have
- known s- uh, specs on, on the ship, so we test
- against that. Of course, algorithm runs confidence levels, so each
- segmentation, uh, would run a, a confidence,
- uh, level. Uh, but mostly real world testing.
- So the moment that we have a known fixed thing,
- uh, then we can test it against what the
- actual measurement is.
- But the thing, and it's a clever question,
- the, the answer really exists in the tolerance
- that the client requires because
- there will be an error.
- So if your toler- if your tolerance is one foot, you're happy with that,
- great.
- We did roofing for years. Those guys cut out five feet by f- They,
- they'll
- draw a line, they'll cut two feet over from it.
- Uh, if you're in the cen- centimeter range and you're within less
- than ten
- percent, generally, I... my experience in industry
- is clients been fairly
- comfortable with that because the historicals have been
- zero.
- Thank you.
- Any other questions?
- All right. I think, I think we're it between you and lunch,
- so appreciate everybody
- attending. Um, if you take away anything, you saw a lot of utility
- inspection use cases today. We think the surface space
- is just as big in the
- government market for asset inspection, building inspect-
- inspection, critical infrastructure inspection,
- and we want to partner, uh, with
- you to solve those problems. So appreciate your time. Thanks,
- everybody.
- [clapping]
Watch Time
45 Mins 33 Secs
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