Perpetual flight: The incredible technology behind non-stop drones | Fatema Hamdani

*Special Note: At 0:54 in the video Fatema says "not defense", but she intended to say "not military." Kraus Aerospace is a private company that consults in security and defense.*
Read more at BigThink.com:
Follow Big Think here:
YouTube:
Facebook:
Twitter:
Fatema Hamdani:
So when we look at UAV platforms (or drones as we call them commonly) there are multiple different types of platforms. There’s rotary devices or multi-rotor. And then there’s fixed-wing UAV platforms. Fixed-wing cover the larger use cases where you’re talking about flying them anywhere from 2,000, 16,000 going up to 35,000 feet, which is the regular airspace under which aircrafts operate as well. And fixed-wing UAVs are categorized by their size and weight starting from Group 1 which is the smallest going up to Group 5, which are the larger ones which carry way larger payloads and might also be used for offensive purposes that might carry missiles and other things. So these groupings actually we, for example, Kraus Aerospace, it’s a private company, not defense. So we only play within that Group 1 to Group 4 platforms, where they’re primarily focused or Group 3 platforms. They’re primarily focused on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or payload that provide things like communication, signal intelligence. You are talking about radio relay or payloads that do lidar or electrical optical or infrared camera. So any kind of visual payloads that allow and facilitate for decision-makers to make rapid decisions on the ground.
So this conversation is very timely. Everybody is hearing about Space Force and what the government is doing there, there are articles all over. DARPA is talking about it and DARPA is investing in it. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, others are kind of coming in together to help us. So essentially if you take a look at it we are fairly dependent on the satellites that are out there – to launch a satellite, to repair a satellite, to do maintenance around a satellite, this is an extremely expensive proposition. And those are also very easy to take out, so if there is a certain missile that attacks (and there are four or five countries in the world that actually have anti-satellite missiles), that could take out a satellite. But that’s not the only way of crippling a satellite. You could do jamming, you could do multiple things where the receivers are, the signal, other components that are associated with satellites—You mess with any of that, it kind of takes out a satellite. So, for example, I think it was back in January of 2016 that we have 13 or 14 GPS satellites out there and we were taking down one of them, and there was a really minor 100 millisecond or 300 millisecond difference in sync, because there were some components that were introduced that caused a lapse in the time, and because from a GPS or when you use GPS to guide you time is extremely important, and syncing up of that—wherever you were before and where you are now, that’s how GPS can guide you. And so there is a break in that sync you suddenly will go off and we experienced that in January of 2016 for a very small period. But that shows you even the smallest things can literally bring down an entire country to their knees when some of these critical satellites are taken down.
But when you think of persistent platforms or long-endurance or nonstop platforms, redundancy is a key component that actually has to be covered across multiple of these components: redundancy in communication, redundancy in energy sources. That’s where the multiple energy sources comes in. So we utilize a RAM air turbine which essentially would drop down and can utilize the wind energy to give that push that the aircraft might need to carry it through the night, so that when the solar panels take over they’re able to charge. We would use similar batteries like lithium ion (which goes into a Tesla) or a lithium polymer battery. Then combine that and what we have done is we’ve written code that allows us to detect thermals or uplift, similar to what a bird would do. Birds don’t get tired, they soar, they keep soaring and they identify thermals. And that’s how they do it.

We’ve captured that from an AI perspective and taught the machine or the autopilot to detect these thermals algorithmically using a linear quadratic equation Kalman filter. What that means is even the slightest movement that happens on the wings, it’s detected, and then the center of that thermal is detected so that the aircraft can stay up pretty much with no amperages used from the lithium ion battery or the lithium polymer battery that is on board. So now what you’ve done is you’re utilizing natural energy sources for nonstop performance.