Last month, AUVSI and SAE International hosted the first Business of Automated Mobility Forum, bringing together participants and speakers from across the automated mobility industry to develop actionable roadmaps to success.   During a keynote address by Skydio CEO Adam Bry and an Enterprise Solutions Series presented by Roy Goldman, VP of Product Management and Mike Ross, Sr. Director of Product Management at Skydio, Forum attendees learned about the importance of combining software advancements in autonomous flight and cloud connectivity to ensure drone uses across verticals can provide the most value possible.   Autonomy Will Unlock a New UAS Paradigm

Public safety. Healthcare. Hunger. These were among the humanitarian challenges that young entrepreneurs targeted recently – perhaps even more passionately than profits – in the 2021 Nigerian Drone Business Competition. Almost 1,000 aspiring business leaders, ages 16 to 30, entered the contest, representing every state in Africa’s largest nation. The turnout stunned planners, who had feared that a pandemic-necessitated shift from an in-person to a virtual event would stunt participation.  “That just kind of shows you the entrepreneurial spirit that is here in Nigeria,” said Eno Umoh, primary organizer of the competition. “There is a lot of interest in drone technology here, and we want to harness that.”

Bringing unmanned systems into service for the U.S. military increasingly requires integrating complex hardware, software, algorithms and other elements from different vendors and developers. Five experts on the challenges of safe, effective integration offered their insights Wednesday in a panel discussion called, “Advancing Autonomy Through Platform Integration.” Moderator Kevin Hagan, unmanned systems account executive for Peraton, opened the discussion with a description of its scope.

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are becoming widely used in naval defense operations and commercial applications such as oil and gas surveying, environmental monitoring and search and rescue. During a breakout session today at XPONENTIAL, Arjuna Balasuriya, Senior Scientist at Charles River Analytics presented a new whitepaper on, “Assured Onboard Autonomy Architecture for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles.” Balasuriya’s remarks and whitepaper focused on how building trust with end-users to support limited human interaction with enable AUVs to be integrated in a way that reaches their fullest potential. A successfully integrated AUV must be adaptable to varying environmental and internal state changes, with top consideration being accuracy, bias and complexity.