THE SKY GUYS • Roadmap

TSG’s engineering team presented updates on its suite of highway monitoring technologies designed to automate vehicle enforcement and flag road anomalies such as potholes and cracked asphalt. Representatives of the Ministry of Transportation Ontario and Ontario Centres of Excellence observed TSG’s real-time object detection-on-chip, which included detection and counting of people and cars relevant to High-Occupancy Vehicle lane enforcement.

TSG looks forward to the release of new UAV regulations by end of 2018 that will include permissions and risk-mitigating measures for drones flying close to and over-top people. Next steps include operational testing of the software and UAV along a remote highway, as well as a privacy impact assessment prior to any deployment.

This week, we have been granted a Special Flight Operations Certificate (SFOC) by Transport Canada, a permit for commercial Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) flights, for the DX-3 Vanguard. This permit allows us to perform testing that will put the DX-3 through critical elements of integrated flight testing, including performance benchmarking and evaluating Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) transition, forward-flight, endurance, systems safety, and various aspects of human factors.

The SFOC approval comes after months of testing and evaluation in a controlled laboratory environment. It is a testament to the industry-leading engineering design and flight operations expertise at The Sky Guys.

Read the full press release here

This week, we have finalized an agreement with Wings of Flight Inc., to conduct future DX-3 Vanguard flight tests at Toronto Markham Airport CNU8. Flight tests at this location will include Line of Sight (LOS) and simulated Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) only.

As Ontario’s first UAV/UAS High Tech Aerospace Campus, Allan Rubin, President of Wings of Flight Inc., as well as Stephane Dumas, Aviation Consultant at Hunter Air & Space Consulting and Range Safety Officer have welcome The Sky Guys’ team in the testing of our DX-3 Vanguard at Toronto Markham Airport CNU8.

Read the full press release here

Members of our engineering and military procurement teams were invited to demonstrate the VTOL-transition and advanced Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning-enabled detection capabilities of the DX-3 Vanguard.

By and large, these capabilities resemble those of Department of Defense (DoD) Group 4/NATO Class 3 systems, but with the operational footprint of a DoD Group 2-3/NATO Class 1 small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS).

Attended by some 100 representatives of primarily U.S. defense contractors and component commands of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), the event featured live demos and was held at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in Indiana. Following the event, we were invited to the subsequent Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) event held by the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in August 2018 at Camp Roberts’ McMillan Airfield in California.

We have teamed up with NVIDIA, IBM, and University of Toronto to be awarded $750,000 from the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) as part of the Small Business Innovation Challenge (SBIC). Our group will work closely with the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO) to develop an artificial intelligence-enabled drone solution to monitor Ontario’s 400-series highways in response to the Vehicle Occupancy Detection Problem Statement.

The application, titled, “Long-Range AI-Enabled Unmanned Aerial System for Highway Traffic Enforcement with Future Road Applications,” was selected and funding will be administered by OCE on behalf of the Ontario government over the next two years while The Sky Guys, NVIDIA, IBM, and U of T work with Ministry of Transportation on this project.

Read the full press release here