Defense-Tested Drone Tech Enters Commercial Market

Utopia Compression brings AI-based passive sensing, navigation and autonomy solutions developed for defense applications to BVLOS, counter-UAS and other commercial drone operations

Utopia Compression, an advanced technology company with more than two decades of experience providing services to the defense sector, is looking to branch out by providing artificial intelligence-based software solutions to the fast-growing commercial UAV and advanced air mobility (AAM) industries.

In an interview, Priya Ganapathy, customer success lead at Utopia Compression, said the company’s technology, which has already been vetted by defense sector customers including the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy, is easily transferable to meet the needs of the growing commercial drone market.

“What we primarily do is we actually use the cameras which are on board the UAVs or drones, and we provide advanced situational awareness to the drone operator for BVLOS operations, for counter-UAS, and for general ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance],” she said.

The Los Angeles-based company has also developed a system that allows a single operator to handle multiple drones flying in a swarm to complete a single mission. While such a capability has obvious benefits in battlefield applications, commercial drone operators are just beginning to realize the potential of such a technology.

Ganapathy said the Commercial UAV Expo, recently held in Las Vegas, was the first venue where Utopia Compression demonstrated the capabilities of its products for the commercial UAV market customers. Among the company’s areas of expertise showcased at the Expo was the technology used to provide advanced situational awareness solutions in both the aerial and maritime domains.

“This is essentially detecting the threats, from non-cooperator actors, and then tracking them and classifying them,” she said.

Because the company’s technology is primarily passive, it does not need any radar-like sensors, a critical feature in defense operations where the aim is to detect without being detected, said Lakshmi Rangaraju, senior research and development engineer, at the company.

“And especially with the decreasing drone size, it is difficult for radar-like active sensors to capture these objects and make sure they are being identified at a good distance, to ensure the right maneuver or to avoid the collision or to take the right action,” Rangaraju said.

Background in maritime detection technology

Although it has only recently begun to market its aerial technologies to the commercial sector, the company has licensed its maritime surveillance solutions to Teledyne FLIR for about a dozen years, said Joseph Yadegar, Utopia Compression’s founder and president.

“We have also done a number of experimental tests of some of our aerial capabilities, such as swarm and others, with other companies in the recent year or so,” he said. “Currently we are speaking with commercial counter-UAS vendors as well as public safety agencies who’re testing our software for BVLOS and counter-UAS operations.”

The company offers a broad portfolio of detection and navigation products designed to fill the needs of its defense customers, as well as those of the commercial UAV and AAM industries.

To solve one of the biggest challenges confronting the drone delivery industry – how to complete the last-mile of delivery in GPS-denied urban environments – the company has introduced Co-NAVIGATE, a software solution, that employs sensor fusion to help identify “smart landmarks” to allow a drone to navigate itself, without the need of GPS.

The company’s AETHER, detect-and-avoid system, combines the use of computer vision with autonomous-system technologies to help usher in the future of widespread BVLOS flight and AAM operations. Its CO AIR system is designed to orchestrate the complex series of multiple interactions between ground and aerial vehicles.

Calling on its background in producing systems designed for military uses, Utopia Compression designed SwarmSync to augment the capabilities of UAS swarms, a feature that the company hopes will make it useful across a wide spectrum of civilian applications.

Layered approach to technologic development

Ganapathy said the company’s technology has been developed to fit in with the layered approach to sensing, detection and navigation challenges favored by the U.S. military.

“Our approach really does replace radar and we are able to do these operations either at short or long distances, depending on how far the object or the drone we want to detect is,” she said.

She said she believes this approach to developing software solutions will stand the company in good stead, as it pivots its marketing strategy to appeal to commercial UAV and counter-UAV customers. “I would say the transition is straightforward,” she said. “Our systems are agnostic as to the sensor. We can either use our payload or we can use the payload of the customer.”

Company officials hope to focus their efforts in the commercial space on helping to enable the development of a universal BVLOS standard. The lack of such a standard has proven to be a major impediment to the commercial drone industry’s ability to scale up, Ganapathy said.

“That’s where we would play a major role, because the capabilities that we provide as part of the passive sensing layer would enable those capabilities so that the drones can make effective, timely decisions,” she said.