Uncrewed Systems Technology 049 - April/May 2023

21 where she worked as a research associate building data acquisition systems for fibre optic sensors. Then came her first start-up, Haleos, which sold micro-fabrication and optoelectronics products. As vice- president, Heiks raised capital and grew the business for 6 years before selling it. During that time she was also studying for her master’s. Next came two more start-ups including Nuvotronics, which built phased-array radars and millimetre-wave antenna systems, usually for aerospace applications. Growing Nuvotronics, she raised capital and built alliances with large commercial and defence companies before selling it to Cubic Corporation. Machine vision A stint as president and chief operating officer at Duos Technologies brought experience of very high-speed, high- resolution imaging combined with AI/ ML for automated safety inspection of freight railcars. Here, Heiks’ master’s in computer vision came in handy. “They build portals throughwhich a train 2miles long passes through at 70mph, taking visible and infrared images as it is speeding by. A fewminutes later you can tell whether a nut is out of place or if awheel bearing is too hot,” she says. “We could detect all kinds ofmechanical defects.” Turning this concept around by putting the sensors or cameras on moving vehicles creates opportunities for UAVs in high-speed, high-resolution inspection services aided by computer vision and AI/ML technologies. This is where Censys Technologies comes in, with its long- range Sentaero UAVs. Invited by Censys to meet an electric utility company for which Censys was demonstrating one of its UAVs, Heiks was impressed by the system in which truck/ trailer-based mobile command centres support multiple UAVs. Some missions might cover hundreds or thousands of miles using multiple trailers and fleets of the aircraft. Adapting AI “I watched this in action and I thought about the implications for both government and commercial use,” she says. “I thought these guys were going to go far, but at the time they did not have the AI/ML capability to build on their data sets. “So I imagined that very soon Censys would be adapting its payloads and taking on all kinds of data – spectrographic, hyperspectral, thermal and so on – and discerning from that certain patterns such as, ‘That is too hot, that plant is a different species, that is a car, that guy is carrying a gun and he shouldn’t be.’ These are the sorts of things you can do when you have smarts on your aircraft.” These capabilities are now integrated into Censys’ CensWise AI computer vision system. Heiks then hired technologists from Duos, including AI expert David Ponevac as CTO, where they set up platforms such as RailSens software. This takes data from UAV flights over miles of railway looking for vegetation encroachment, anomalies in the rails themselves, anything that shouldn’t be there. She expects this kind of service with UAVs to replace manned aircraft and more subjective monitoring processes. “The issue is that you get invasive Noel Heiks | In conversation Uncrewed Systems Technology | April/May 2023 The Sentourion mobile command centre manages Sentaero operations, and applies AI and machine learning techniques to image processing