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19 by developing ways of putting privately owned UAVs to public purposes. Sold on the idea that UAVs could be “an enormous force for good”, as Vernon puts it, he and Walker wanted to find a way to get volunteer UAV pilots to help find lost people, asking themselves how quickly they could pull a solution together and get it to scale. Their complementary backgrounds in systems and application development led them to their initial idea of how to bring the volunteers together to respond to emergencies that UAVs could alleviate. “If everybody had an app and we knew where they were, we could provide them with a notification. They could say if they wanted to respond and we could provide them with real-time comms to coordinate their operations,” Vernon says. A couple of months into the prototyping phase of the coordination app, in August 2017, Hurricane Harvey hit Texas and provided the perfect opportunity to try it out. Vernon says Walker’s response was, “Hey John, we’re going to roll this out slowly to make sure it works. You’ve got a week.” During that week, the development team got the app ready for launch in ‘pre-beta’ form, which is before a piece of software would normally be considered ready to enter the final stage of testing before commercial release. As a result, Vernon says, thousands of people downloaded the app and many of them were able to help with the Harvey recovery effort safely. However, he admits to a degree of ignorance mixed with idealism. “In many ways, we were way ahead of what the industry was capable of supporting. We realised we’d brought thousands of people into an operation with an airspace and operations management perspective that was struggling to maintain a limited number of volunteers,” he says. “We genuinely thought that if we brought in all these people to help, it would be appreciated. While it opened eyes, however, it wasn’t quite appreciated at the time, or at least not in the way we had anticipated.” The Harvey experience showed that the real problem was not a lack of qualified volunteer UAV pilots but how to bridge the gap between the people who need help or other services and those who can provide them – all while those services are still evolving and being defined on a daily basis. Initially, establishing pilots’ bona fides involved asking those who got in touch via the app whether they had a (US) Part 107 licence and whether they had registered their UAVs. They would then email proof of qualifications and insurance, Vernon says. Overall, the software worked well, but left a lot to be done manually, Vernon says. “The platform scaled and didn’t fail but it was still very rudimentary.” Maturing platform The situation is very different now, Vernon says. Pilots provide information about their capabilities and credentials through the app, including Part 107 licences and waivers for example. Processing the licences’ international equivalents is under development. “We’ve been enhancing the facilities for pilots to provide us with information while figuring out what the requirements are for particular missions, then matching the qualifications to the needs in real time,” he says. “Now we can send out targeted missions to thousands of pilots simultaneously.” The app hasn’t fully automated these processes yet. Vernon estimates that about 80% of them are automatic, but there are features DroneUp doesn’t yet consider to be reliable enough. One of these is AI software designed to authenticate a Part 107 licence from a photograph sent by the pilot. The idea is to confirm that it is real and hasn’t been duplicated or tampered with, and to cross- reference it with a UAV pilot database. Vernon says the AI has reached about 70% accuracy. “We are continuing to train it while using manual validation. When John Vernon | In conversation Unmanned Systems Technology | October/November 2018 The app uses networks to match drones, pilots and skills with people’s needs, while a branded high-vis vest helps establish a pilot’s bona fides (Courtesy of DroneUp)