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20 In conversation | John Young The reason for that, he explains, stems from choosing to run the power supplies from standard civilian or military vehicles, the former with 12 V and the latter with 24 V electrics, in combination with the very small and light power supply. “To be honest, the voltage just settled around there,” he says. With more and more military and security-grade counter-UAV systems coming onto the market and, at the opposite end of the sophistication scale, low-cost GPS/GNSS jammers becoming cheaper and common all the time, threats to UAV operations are proliferating. “If you want to transport high-value goods with a UAV and you have little Johnny sitting in his garden with a laptop and a cheap UAV jammer attacking it, it’s going to do one of three things – land, return to base or fall out of the sky – depending on how it has been programmed and how much battery power it has,” he says. “With two of those, little Johnny will come and take the payload, whatever it may be.” When Young turned his attention towards developing ways of protecting UAVs from such threats, the idea he came up with (last May) was SafeFlight, an avionics system with multiple redundant sensors that can be built into a physically protected airframe, ensuring that the loss of a few sensors won’t stop the vehicle completing its mission or coming home safely. “As a concept, SafeFlight is a navigation system built within an impervious UAV system, although you could take SafeFlight’s avionics and put them in pretty much any UAV,” he explains. The primary navigation sensor is a GNSS receiver backed up by inertial sensors, a camera with visual processing- based guidance software and a built-in failsafe, he says. The concept also includes a quadcopter or octocopter with a polished titanium airframe that acts as a Faraday cage, a tough outer shell impervious to small arms fire and a reflective surface to resist laser attack. He expects to bring SafeFlight to market in less than two years. Protect the hobbyist In terms of the technical challenges facing the industry in general, Young sees increasing the endurance of electrically powered UAVs as the biggest and most persistent. However, the more successful the industry is at solving this and at producing more capable UAVs generally, the more restrictive the legislation that will be applied. That will disproportionately affect the smaller vehicles, he believes, particularly in the amateur and non- commercial segments. “Hobbyists drive a lot of businesses – look at DJI,” he says. “Would they have grown as big as they are if it were not for the sort of people who just enjoy flying simple drones? Probably not, and that would have affected the commercial market and the equipment that most people use for filming; the money wouldn’t be in the industry to develop it.” Drone Evolution’s technical team, he says, is essentially Young and the external development houses that refine and productionise the demonstrators he builds. “At the moment, we outsource that work because it is the cheapest option for us, but we are looking at bringing some manufacturing in- house. Certainly within the next 12 to 24 months we will have our own manufacturing,” he says. Asked about his long-term career path, he says he won’t focus on that until SkyWire and SafeFlight – plus a couple of undisclosed projects that don’t yet have IP protection – are established. “At the moment, my goals are to develop them, get them to market and see where it goes from there,” he says. December/January 2020 | Unmanned Systems Technology John Young, 48, grew up in Wales near the capital, Cardiff, and attended Whitchurch High School, where he excelled in hands-on craft, design and technology subjects, learning woodwork and metalwork and how to operate machine tools such as simple lathes and milling machines. After leaving school, he went to a technical college that is now part of the University of Wales in Cardiff, where he gained an Ordinary National Diploma (OND) and a Higher National Diploma (HND) in electrical and electronic engineering. That led to his first job as a workshop engineer. Before forming Drone Evolution, in 2018, he had several jobs in facilities management, including eight years as a pest control technician at Rentokil Initial from 2003 to 2012. He moved to Mitie that year in a similar role, and was later promoted to sales surveyor at the company. As Drone Evolution’s technical director, Young is officially responsible for all things technical, although he describes his role as dreaming. “My role is really looking for novel and disruptive products, which I put to the other board members. If we get green lights, we get on with it,” he says. John Young