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the transmissions were sent via Wi-Fi using repeaters to help the signal make it across the field, but Sentien Robotics CEO Brandon Borko said the communica- tions method can be adapted to whatever connectivity is available.
Shepherd also automates the process for deconflicting flights, which ensures that drones don’t run into one another in the air.
“We developed a piece of software \[Shepherd\] that does deconfliction for all the vehicles and allows us to take mission-level requests and do all the au- tomation required to make that mission happen,” said Christopher Vo, Sentien Robotics’ chief scientist.
Shepherd can be uploaded onto a wide range of hardware, but for the Quantico demonstration, it ran on the Hive, which is a small trailer that looks like a gen- erator parked at a construction site. The Hive can store 18 hobbyist-size drones on shelves inside, launch them automatical- ly and recharge them after their return. A robotic process brings the selected drone to a launching platform from which it will
eventually take flight.
Shepherd sends all the flight informa-
tion to a Salesforce-based government cloud environment via an application programming interface. A dashboard shows information on every flight that has been queued and every flight that has been completed. Users can view flight times, what was ordered, locations, or- der numbers and other information, said Mark Bailey, a senior test engineer at Sci- entific Research Corp.
The Salesforce system does not cur- rently transmit data to Shepherd, but Bai- ley said the capability, which would allow users to see what inventory is available within ATAK, will be added in the future.
Salesforce’s dashboard capabilities al- low users to create simple bar graphs or pie charts for different metrics, and SRC and Salesforce have been experimenting with other reporting options for this proj- ect, Bailey said.
SCALING UP SECURELY
Right now the technology is working with dozens of drones, but the eventual goal
is to scale the technology to work with thousands, Thobaben said, adding that he expects to reach a larger scale in a little over a year.
However, Borko pointed out that “as we scale up, there are going to be bottle- necks along the way.”
One of the challenges is adding the payload. Right now if a drone is set to deliver ammunition, that ordnance must be attached to the drone by hand. Borko and Thobaben envision an environment in which no human is involved in the pro- cess, except for ordering.
Additionally, as hundreds and then thousands of drones are added to a net- work, bandwidth will become an issue, Borko said. Network capacity will be ad- dressed by offloading navigational pro- cessing from Shepherd and doing more of it onboard the drone with collision avoid- ance systems.
Cybersecurity is also a concern for projects that involve autonomous sys- tems and large amounts of data stored in a cloud environment — not to mention the delivery of valuable and potentially deadly supplies.
“Anything that operates on the ‘inter- webs’ of the world is going to be vulner- able,” Thobaben said.
The Salesforce environment is compli- ant with the Federal Risk and Authoriza- tion Management Program up to Level 4, and none of the data is stored outside the United States, Bailey said.
The security of drone management systems is a priority for industry, and Sen- tien Robotics plans to remain focused on it, Borko told GCN.
“Cybersecurity is a big concern for these platforms because you don’t want to have \[drones\] in the air and who con- trols them get changed to someone else,” he said. “We’re going to incorporate the technologies as they come out.”
The Hive Final Mile project is a joint ef- fort that involves the Marine Corps Next Generation Logistics initiative and the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Rapid Reaction Technology Office. •
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