00:17:41 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:17:41] S0: gonna have to have like way more autonomy in the system for intercepting drones in there? [00:17:45] S1: Interceptors really... So autonomy does best in structured environments. Like, you know, you drove my Tesla Model three today. The FSD on that, you know, it's still at this point, like if someone walks out from behind a bus or, you know, walks into... Walks behind one side and out the other, it's not really good at predicting that, you know, they're gonna come out the other side. It it might run into them. Those kinds of unstructured environments are are where it really struggles. If you think about, like, you know, humanity has spent close to a trillion dollars developing, like, full self driving, and a Tesla Model three has more compute than, you know, hundreds, thousands of times more compute than we could put on a $2,000 drone, that makes the, like, go, you know, hunt an individual soldier task very hard. But the, like, hit a dot in the sky task is much more reasonable. Like it's it's it's much more easily automatable. It's a much more controlled environment. It's it's much more math defined. Right? You just need to make these intercept paths. So Bandit will be a much more autonomous solution. We're still gonna have that manual precision. I I won't go into details, but we have ideas on where it's really helpful. But then it will be a much more autonomy focused product. [00:18:58] S0: What was the biggest, like, technical challenge on building that?
00:19:01 · Olaf Hichwa
[00:19:01] S1: I mean, we're we're... Look at this thing. It's a three d print. We're super early. The biggest technical challenge will be manufacturing it, as always, and we built 10 or 20 of these things. This is serial number three. So the biggest challenge has not been hit yet. But right now, one of the big challenges that we're working on is making sure that we can build a component base that's compatible across these two products. So, you know, we've invested a ton into this production facility, and we have gotten really good at making drone flight controllers, the the guts behind drones, drone motor drivers, radios, these these components that are made in volume. No one else has a factory like this. If we wanna be able to really mass produce Bandit, which is what is needed of course, we should leverage this factory to build Bandit as well. We should, you know, use 80% of this production line to make components, and then those components should be shared. So one of the big challenges was like working on, you know, a spec for Archer components, spec for Bandit components that overlap. Bandit goes a lot faster than Archer. Bandit goes north of two fifty kilometers per hour in this prototype state. It'll probably get a lot faster. And kind of misusing those components to go that fast has been a, has been a big challenge. I think also figuring out, the kind of flight dynamics of this product. As you go faster and faster, the odynamics change a lot. That impacts the control systems, and that needs to be really carefully tuned. But this has a huge set of problems. It's a really fun project, because it's still very much early days near us. It's a tiny team developing this. You know, we're flight testing all the time. We're crashing. It's failing. You know, there's a bunch of hot glue in this thing. It's it's very much a a early stage, you know, mess around and find out product that will eventually, just like Archer, hit mass production.
00:20:46 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:20:46] S0: What was it like when you first decided to start working on this? Like what was the first few weeks and iterations of this product like? [00:20:53] S1: Yeah, I remember that. I mean it was nights and weekends at the very beginning. [00:20:56] S0: And when did you decide? Like what what made the flip in your head?
00:21:00 · Olaf Hichwa
[00:21:00] S1: Really it was it was taking that call with the Ukrainians and just getting getting on those calls, really, and seeing the need. You know, I grew up in DC. Very normal nice bring up. Right? Went to, you know, a good local school in the area, and never really thought about, like, the dangers of getting bombed or anything like that. It was just so foreign. And I kinda had the thought, like, why work on weapon systems when I could work on, you know, Bay Area stuff, like, you know, getting a burrito to arrive thirty seconds faster at at a house or something like that. Talking to Ukrainians really quickly changed my mindset. I can't believe I, like, like, how quickly it became abundantly clear that if you don't build weapon systems, everything falls apart. And not building weapon systems is a massive luxury. Like, being able to, you know, sip your matcha and take your electric skateboard to work, to your Bay Area cushy job, is something that, you know, every Ukrainian dreams of, I'm sure, but does not have. Right? They they have... They are worried about getting blown up by Russians as as, you know, that's a real threat. I think if Americans kind of remembered what what history was was like and and what the generations before us did to make sure that we can live this good life, people would be much more interested in in building weapon systems. I think that realization was really what made me, like, wanna stay up all night designing the motherboard, the the main PCBA, printed circuit board assembly in Archer at the time. So, yeah, that was like the first big engineering project, just ripping ripping the motherboard. It was... I was a full time board designer, so I I had been doing it for quite a while. And I remember that motherboard, I bought it on my credit card. It was the first PCBA of my career that I designed that worked for a spin. And that was really important because there was not time for another spin. That was that was that was our shot. So really really thankful that that worked out. Thankfully it was a it was a lot of, you know, knowledge pulled from the drone racing days. Was the exact same flight computer that I designed in high school as an example. Yeah, those early days were awesome. It was just Soren and I cooking.
00:23:19 · Olaf Hichwa, Ty Morse
He was up all night doing mechanical CAD behind the initial birds, then we, you know, asked our friends to come and help and camped out in his basement in Vermont. But great, great times. [00:23:31] S0: You mentioned that you went to Ukraine recently. What was that like? What's changed since the first time you came?
00:23:36 · Olaf Hichwa
[00:23:36] S1: The the conflict has become more intense. Like, on the previous trips, like, my my reaction in Kyiv, which is, you know, pretty far from the front line, was just like You can probably almost forget the country as it were. Like there's long periods of time where it's totally normal. And life always continues. That's one of the big learnings. Like even, you know, 20 kilometers from the front line, you can have, had a great steak dinner with friends and discuss, you know, random topics. Like life always continues. But during the first few trips it was like... Kyiv seemed... It was like... It's like Paris, but, you know, in Eastern Europe. I'd say the the war has intensified a lot. The the strikes on civilian infrastructure by Russia, it's it's awful. It's it's, you know, an act of terror. And they're really... They're not pulling the punches. Right? They're they're purposely targeting apartment complexes of of civilians. And like, you hear Shaheeds, you know, up in the sky just buzzing by, and that's just like a thing that people have had to live with. What is a Shahed? It's a Group three, which is DOD speak for big drone. It's kinda like the size of like a minivan and it's just packed full of explosives. Just just packed. And they're super cheap. They're like tens of thousands of dollars. They have little rocket motors, they launch up. And they're little deltas. They're... Not little, big, big deltas. It was actually an Iranian or a German design initially, a long time ago. And the Iranians perfected it. That's why the name. And then there was this, like, crazy deal where Russia shipped bars of gold, literal physical bars of gold to Iran for the design, and then Russia started producing them. And now they send, you know, hundreds of these things every night to Ukrainian cities to to blow up Ukrainian civilians. And worse than just hitting the apartment buildings often, they're really... They're not holding any punches. They're blowing up power, which if you like... If your power station goes down, people freeze. They're they're really just trying to blow up anything that makes the the lives of ordinary Ukrainians trying to defend themselves hell. And those impacts are are more clear in in Kyiv now. On one of the one of the nights I was in Ukraine last time, I actually went out with a military unit that was hunting Shahids.