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**Keenan Wyrobek:** They fly at about 100 meters, so 300 feet. |
**Jerod Santo:** 100 meters, 300 feet. Thank you. What kind of stuff do you have to avoid? Obviously, birds, but at that -- I mean, cell towers, airstrips, perhaps? What's the kind of stuff that has to be avoided at that height? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah, for sure. So yeah, you can have very tall cranes, cell towers. You can have inaccurate maps, so you may not be at the height you think you are, so there's a hill or a mountain there... Yeah, definitely other aircraft. That's a big part of what we avoid. There's not a ton of passenger aircraft ... |
**Break**: \[21:57\] |
**Jerod Santo:** How much does regulation play into this rollout? I assume every area probably has different rules about how you can go about flying your drones at 300 feet... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah, I wish everybody had rules. |
**Jerod Santo:** Really? \[laughs\] Usually, people say they want less rules when they're trying to scale up. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah... I mean, when you're a startup and you go to a regulator and you're like "Cool, I would like to do this thing", and they're like "Well, that's not allowed", and then basically from there it's like all by exception. And so you have to kind of work it out, the rules by which you operate at the ... |
**Jerod Santo:** I see. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** And as a startup, that's a slow process, and startups need to go fast to survive... And yeah, that's why I said I wish there was some precedent. In some ways, obviously, there's some luxury in getting to help create the precedent... But yeah, it's a lot of working with the regulators. Some things ab... |
Yeah, it's a big part of what we do, but it's also... We've gone from that being a big challenge maybe 10 years ago, to now it's something that we've gotten quite good at, and quite good at working with these partners and these regulators as partners, and working with them proactively enough that we can generally work ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I was thinking of the luxury of not having rules that are already defined, because those can slow you down. But actually, not having rules and not having a clear path towards engagement - that means you have to trailblaze. And to trailblaze, you've got to get out a machete and hack away a bunch o... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. There's a great story -- here in the United States, starting about six years ago, we started working on the sensor system on the aircraft that can sense and avoid other aircraft. This is a system that uses machine learning, and machine learning is a class of software that the regulators have n... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[27:50\] This is an example where the word "regulation" - which you haven't quite said yet - gets really weird. And I don't want to go into politics, but it seems to be the word that gets thrown around. Regulation, less regulation, more regulation... But as a developer, I really lean back on what y... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah... I think there's a couple of layers for how we think about this. The first one is because everywhere we've been, everywhere we've gone, there hasn't been some, like you said, specification to follow, we've taken the mantra that our first job is to convince ourselves. And not in like a handwav... |
And so by doing that legwork upfront and internally proving to ourselves something that we really believe in first, and then bringing it to them - that's been core from our perspective. And then the only other piece of it that I would say is it's all relationships. These are all people on the regulatory side, they've g... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How would you frame -- this isn't an exact one-to-one when I say this, but how would you frame test coverage in terms of a coverage level, confidence level? When you ship something and it's in a regulation standpoint, or you have a specification you've got to adhere to - is there like 95%, 98%? Like... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Oh, great question. So there's a model for thinking about this that was called the Swiss Cheese Model. I did not come up with that name, although I'm known for naming things with really dumb names... It was actually a NASA name, the Swiss Cheese Model. Conceptually, basically what it is - every appr... |
Examples of our layers of Swiss cheese - you're going to be familiar with things like unit testing, and static testing, and things like that, that are commonly done in software... Software in the loop testing - so this is where you have full on physics level simulation running of your full system, even your full fleet,... |
\[32:10\] We talked a little bit about the hardware in the loop testing, where you take the hardware itself, the brain of the aircraft, plug it into a simulator and fool it into thinking it's in the real world... That's great for testing the actual hardware level components. If you short out a certain bus, does the act... |
And this is just on the software side. When we think about hardware, very similar things - many layers of testing of the hardware, to make sure we understand deeply its performance and its reliability. And there are entire teams of folks who look at all that testing, and basically are constantly questioning "Okay, in t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** These releases, are they -- share as much as you like. You seem to be very sharing, and I like this. I think about releases and I think about "Well, if I released my test level from idea to new capability", as you said, into production, there's probably a several layers that are in that middle groun... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Okay. So depending on the scale of a given feature... To talk about one of the biggest features we've ever released - we just released it recently. So we talked about the drone that flies up high, it has a wing, and can hover. Until about a month ago, in our releases and our operations, we were only... |
\[35:55\] We will look at all the new features that folks think are ready for a release, and we'll look at like "How tested are they? How proven are they? How good is the test coverage?" and all these layers of Swiss cheese. And then we'll decide "Yup, this feature is ready. This feature is ready. That feature is not r... |
You can kind of think of that flight test as like the last leg. If we find something in flight test, that's a red flag to us. Like "Hey, the other layers of Swiss cheese aren't good enough." So if we find something in the flight test during that campaign, we're immediately investing in those other levels of Swiss chees... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you have the idea of a black box in your thing? I mean, I know that airplanes do, so I imagine you've got some version of a black box, where if it does - I'm sorry - crash, that you've got some sort of thing in there... And then I also think about observability, because you've got all this testin... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah, absolutely. So we log a ton of data on the vehicles, at all times. And that's of course done in all this testing, but also in production. And the philosophy is that anything that could possibly go wrong, or be a near miss, you've got to study. And you mentioned crashes - I should mention we ha... |
So yeah, if we ever have a parachute landing in tests, or operations, or anything that's even close to a weird data, we go study that, to basically deeply, deeply understand it, because quite often it's a new insight. We're so far in the long tail of the problem that many of the problems we see now, they happen one in ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Total shame. It should happen more often... \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** That's right. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Exactly. No, that's not the shame. The shame is not logging it. So we log these things. Now, in addition to the logging, to enable us to like go through those logs and understand everything that happened -- we use those logs not just for like root causing a specific problem, we use those logs to und... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[40:16\] Have you ever logged a tornado? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Hah, we've definitely -- yeah. So the closest thing we've logged -- we've logged some very small... I don't think you'd call them a tornado. They're basically -- the things are too small to be considered tornadoes. At some of our testing, we're actually chasing some tornadoes right now, as we look f... |
The craziest thing we have a lot of log data on is what's called a microburst. So it's the beginning of a thunderhead formation, about first 90 seconds of a thunderhead. You have the vertical winds at like 50, 60, 70 miles an hour vertically, in the middle of the microburst; on the sides of the microburst, the same thi... |
**Jerod Santo:** What do they do in those circumstances? Do they turn around and leave, or do they land immediately, or what's their protocol? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** So it really depends how big it is. this is actually one of the first things we developed AI to forecast. It's because if this is really big, if it's kilometers across, and really strong, if we're in it we're going to end up parachute landing. And we know this because in a lot of our operations arou... |
**Jerod Santo:** I assume there's some sort of wind limit that there's just no chance for anything to fly through successfully. It's gotta be around a hundred miles per hour or so, maybe a little bit less... I don't know, but there's certain storms where it's just like, you'd better just parachute out, because there's ... |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Oh, yeah. There's a certain mountain pass in Rwanda I'm very familiar with, because we have to fly through this mountain pass to serve about a third of the country there... And in this mountain pass the winds get whipping. The winds can be higher than we fly. We fly that aircraft at 60-70 miles an h... |
**Jerod Santo:** Do you have any video feeds? Because you're going to come up with some great drama in those moments if you could capture a video, just when it's really gnarly, you know? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** I've got a great video of the logs of that. It's not \[unintelligible 00:43:28.29\] You can see the position on the maps, going backwards and things... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I don't think Hollywood's going to call you for the log file. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** No... \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Let's talk more about that wing. So did you guys just put the wing on there because you knew eventually you were going to use it, and so you just had it in manufacturing for a long time, but couldn't use it? |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** \[43:47\] Yeah, absolutely. We knew we needed the range. You get about 10x more range flying on a wing, for the same energy, than hovering. And our customers need that range. So many of our use cases need that range. And so yeah, we always knew we needed the range of flying on a wing, and we decided... |
One of the things... You're talking about regulations and safety - that is also part of our ethos. And a difficult thing in a startup is we hire people who like inherent urgency, because if you set a deadline on safety, you can end up in a really bad situation. If you're like "Cool, we must ship this on this date." Som... |
**Jerod Santo:** So what was the range prior to the wing, of a typical drone? ...assume good conditions - how far do they go, and how long a time, and then... You said 10x, so I can do the math, but... That's a huge win. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. Great. Yeah, so we're doing about a mile and a half hovering, and we'll be able to do -- right now we're at about five miles on the wing, and we'll be able to take that to about 10 miles over time... Again, as we continue to validate and sort of work our way up to it, once we feel confident in... |
**Jerod Santo:** And I assume each drone launches from a location, and then has to return to the same location, at least until you get multiple hubs in a city, or something. |
**Keenan Wyrobek:** Yeah. That's actually a software feature that's coming in and released next year, is that ability to go from one doc, go make a delivery, and then dock somewhere else. But yeah, you're exactly right. We don't have the density of docking locations yet to need that feature. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. So that cuts your range in half, because you have to get out there, and you've got to get back. |
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