00:03:10 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:03:10] S0: to talk about, like, the current drone market today and where it can kind of transition to maybe five or ten years from now. You said earlier today something on the order of, like, 14,000,000 drones are being sold from China to both Russia and Ukraine, like 7,000,000 to each side, and they're basically just blowing each other up. [00:03:26] S1: Talk about a talk about a business model. I mean, it's terrible. And I I, you know, I I feel bad for the Ukrainians that have to put up with like, you know, their vendor. You know, generally like, we don't like it when our vendors supply to our competitors. We put up with it. Imagine, you know, you're giving feedback. You're a Ukrainian drone manufacturer. You're giving feedback on your design based on the blood of your comrades, and that information is going directly to your enemy. And often the Chinese give Russians the newer drone tech. Right? The first terminal guidance videos I saw on Twitter were from Russian drones. These are AI automated drone strikes. Fiber optic was also like, I saw it on Russian X accounts first. [00:04:08] S0: How do you think that's going to shift over the next couple years as you guys start to ramp?
00:04:08 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:04:08] S0: How do you think that's going to shift over the next couple years as you guys start to ramp? [00:04:11] S1: I think the kind of western drone base is slowly, slowly coming online. People are starting to realize that, you know, drones are the most lethal weapon system of our generation and they will define who runs the world. And we're starting to put two and two together where like, okay, we should probably build them. And so you've got factories springing up. You know, we're not we're not the only company with this million drone dream. I'm seeing new announcements, and other people are saying we're gonna build a million drones a year. I think that's awesome. I think the West needs a lot of million drone factories because China has that as well. So I'm I'm hopeful, you know, in a in a reasonable amount of time, Ukraine will be able to have a a credible alternate to China in the West, in in Europe, in America, in Millennium one, in this building, but all over. [00:05:00] S0: Earlier today, I was in a meeting with you, and you're talking about basically pulling in timelines and making sure that you can actually ship products. [00:05:06] S1: For some reason it's always in, [00:05:07] S0: never out. [00:05:07] S1: Yes, Always in. [00:05:09] S0: What like trade offs did you make on the design of Archer so that you could actually ship it in a fast, rapid pace and scale your production quickly?
00:05:09 · Ty Morse, Olaf Hichwa
[00:05:09] S0: What like trade offs did you make on the design of Archer so that you could actually ship it in a fast, rapid pace and scale your production quickly? [00:05:16] S1: Reality is a very powerful thing, right? When your engineering project is in simulations or in low volume demonstrators or in demo mode, you get to have a lot of control over the world and things are pretty perfect. When you build things that serve a, you know, critical national security objective and are made in massive volume and are used by people whose lives depend on them in volume, you don't have very many luxuries. And you're kind of forced like the... Kinda... I've I've noticed the Elon algorithm is kind of forced upon you. The insane deletion isn't really like a a luxury. It's like a... No, you will fail. You will not deliver anything. Your volumes will be tiny. Your timelines will slip, you have to be vicious in the deletion. Every requirement gets questioned to shit. We push back on all of them. You know, you want picture perfect drone swarms that like, you know, operate like in thousands of units and behave like a wild animal swarm, like a fish swarm, you don't actually get that requirement. That's a demo requirement. And you have to be much more real. You have to think like, what do the users want? What has worked when we deployed? What can we manufacture? And those kind of realities are just hammered into the engineers that work on on Neros products.
00:06:40 · Ty Morse
[00:06:40] S0: A lot of people talk about like autonomous weapon systems now, but you guys very specifically from the beginning are basically trying to focus on trade... Creating the best possible thing for an operator. Yep. And now you're like moving into slightly more autonomous systems, but mainly still focused on the operator. Why did you do that? Why didn't you just go straight to autonomy?
00:06:56 · Olaf Hichwa, Ty Morse
[00:06:56] S1: We gotta look about how the first Archer ever was designed. You know, Soren showed up at my office and was like, I know some Ukrainians from Twitter. Just get on a call with me and they will give us some good feedback on what we need to do. So it immediately was like user obsession from day one. And then what did the users want? They didn't ask for a AI powered drone swarm with a thousand units. They asked for how do I set off the bomb? How do I make the radio not get jammed? How do I go longer range? And so it started there. Right? And then we we we really believe in getting something that works to get feedback. Because if you spend too long just designing in a vacuum, when you have that contact with reality, everything falls apart. Your assumptions are wrong. So we generally focus really heavily in getting something to the field quickly to iterate on. With that being said, you can't just continuously operate on those six week engineering timelines. We touched on it last time. You need a little bit of time to have breathing room. And we we do that by first usually deploying like an initial system, getting feedback, and understanding what the true pain points are. Some of the true pain points we've noticed is is like operator burden is a big deal. If a user has to look at the drone and carefully babysit it for the full like thirty minute strike, you know, you take off and you're commuting for twenty five, thirty minutes, and then going for that... [00:08:17] S0: Is there something like a loss of focus?
00:08:19 · Olaf Hichwa
[00:08:19] S1: There's a loss of focus. And you know, you you gotta take care of your buddy. You gotta watch your surroundings. You have to monitor maybe another drone. We we start to learn what breaks with a full manual solution, and we fix the parts that break. And I think it's like people assume autonomy is like a switch. They go straight from no autonomy to, you know, thousand unit AI swarm, and things fall apart so quickly. Those swarms are so finicky, and they just do not survive first contact with reality. They're they're so, you know, perfectly designed for demo environments with GNSS, with other like unrealistic features. Like they they they assume that your targets won't be moving. They assume your targets won't be occluded. And they assume they won't have like destructive patterns or all these like edge cases of battle aren't considered. So generally, when we're working on products, we're we're focused on what gives America an edge in the fight, and that is usually things like extreme manual precision and things that decrease the operator burden. This has been like one of the big design philosophies behind Archer AI. This is the this is the product here and this is actually a product we're launching today as part of this. So Archer AI is an Archer with an autonomy stack. So in the front of Archer, we've got a computer vision system that can use AI to lock on to a target and fly itself into the target once you get jammed or go over the RF horizon. This is a very like high user load part of the equation. Right? And it allows the user to just command a drone to go into the target. The user can take over. It uses our same industry leading anti jam radio solution. The user can readjust where the AI thinks the target is in real time. If the AI messes up, if, you know, there's something, some countermeasure that the enemy has figured out, the user can readjust. But the drone will go into the target even if you lose comms, even if you're GPS denied. And I think this is like a a really big step forward for what works. Like really regularly, like, let's say you wanted to, you know, go use Archer against an enemy in the battlefield. One of the first things people run into is you go over the RF horizon. Right? If you try and go for the strike, there'll be trees or a mountain or something in the way, and then the radio won't go through that.