01:35:51 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:35:51] S0: Neros has been a bit odd in the sort of defense startup space by not having, you know, an AI pitch. Sort of every, like, hot defense tech startup that's been funded aggressively by his VCs, maybe not every one of them, but basically all of them are are, you know, applying artificial intelligence to the problem. And that's like, they're actually like a lot of companies talk more about applying artificial intelligence to the problem versus what the actual outcome of that is. You know, Neros, we come from a drone racing background, it's pretty natural we'd focus on FPV drones. That was like the first thing we needed to do. We're super pro autonomy. We are we are building autonomy internally and we're working with partners on autonomy. The thing we care about though is is maintaining manual precision and human decision making. So I I believe that the reason why FPV drones have been so effective is because they give a human operator the most precise control of an object through three d space at a large distance. There isn't really anything else, especially in the in the cost category, where you can be sitting 20, 30 kilometers away and precisely navigating, you know, like inch level precision basically. It's it's a wild technology. It's it's like, you know, if you if you'd thought about it fifty years ago, it's like a sci fi capability, you know, it's basically Ender's Game. So but I think the the the importance of that actually sometimes gets overlooked in the in the rhetoric about, you know, autonomous drone systems. Everyone's thinking about the drone swarm, which will be important, but you can't you can't overlook giving why it's so important to give the operator ultimate control. Right now, there's no AI model that is better than a human pilot in basically every circumstance and dealing with the edge cases that are, you know, all across the battlefield. So a lot of folks have chased this idea of sort of end to end autonomous missions where you're doing object recognition and classification on the drone. You're basically saying like, here's the general area for the target, go find it, do object recognition, and then strike it autonomously. Problem with that is basically everything on the battlefield now is highly camouflaged and highly dynamic.
01:38:34 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
So all of these object detection algorithms fail pretty miserably, unless it's like tank driving down the road out in the open. [01:38:43] S1: Which is fucking obvious.
01:38:44 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:38:44] S0: Yeah. And so, especially as as the war in Ukraine has evolved, distances have gotten longer, targets have gotten harder to identify, and also smaller and less valuable the closer to the frontline you are. So the main Russian tactic now for making advancement is guys on foot or motorcycles, and that's because anything of value like a tank is just instantly destroyed by by drones. And even, you know, these these smaller targets are are also instantly destroyed by drones, but you have a bit higher chance of if you're really fast and nimble. There are, you know, smarter ways of doing end to end autonomous missions, and and I'm excited about those. But you don't wanna remove the warfighter's ability to control the system, because at the end of the day, you know, the human warfighter is is like the thing that we value and it's the the it's the decision maker and and again, the the the precision control element is really important. So we we've worked a lot on that. As we move forward, we're thinking about how we give leverage to that person. How do we make it so they can effectively control multiple systems at once? How can they... For the targets where you don't need to manually pilot it into the exact spot, just say, you know, click click here, go there. That is all stuff that we're we're working on, so I think the future is gonna look like each warfighter able to do more and the barrier for entry being much lower. So part of the problem with FPV systems is that they're quite hard to use. There's a lot of nuance in using them, so you compare like a DJI drone versus an FPV drone. Basically, anyone can fly a DJI drone out of the box, and it just works. You don't have to do anything to it. And then you move over to an FPV system, it's like...
01:40:59 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:40:59] S1: You need a highly skilled pilot? [01:41:01] S0: Yeah. Like if I told you to go charge my FPV drone battery, you would not do it correctly. Like the settings on the chart, you know, this is such a specific... It's like, that's the level of detail and nuance that exists in the systems right now that should go away. So it will become much easier over time if we do our job correctly for these systems to be widely distributed and, you know, easy for every warfighter to take advantage of.