Product Overview Wireless Connectivity for UAV Swarms Ahmed Bader, Ph.D. Ahmed@Insyab.com www.insyab.com 2017
Outline Virtues of UAV swarms Why not over-the-counter wireless? Insyab s technology overview Performance benchmarks About Insyab 2
A new horizon Addressable market value of UAV-powered solutions $127B 3
At the crossroads of computer vision and robotics 4
Real-time imaging use cases Public safety Law enforcement Mining and O&G Defense Disaster relief operations Border control Adversary tracking Search & rescue Critical infrastructure surveillance Hydrocarbon leakage Crowd management Heat mapping (thermography) 5
Single-UAV missions 6
Multi-UAV missions 7
UAV Swarms are already out there http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38569027 8
Advents of multi-uav missions 65% Time to complete a mission 40% Accuracy, resolution 20% OPEX Crowd-counting case study. 5 drones @ 50-m altitude. 9
Virtues of UAV swarms Higher sensing resolution Coordinated motion trajectories Distributed sensing & computing Extended coverage Dramatic reduction in time-to-complete a mission Substantial boost in mission success rates 10
What if we add more UAVs?! Latency # of UAVs Throughput 11
Challenges Ahead of UAV Swarms >> connectivity perspective >> Latency Ultra-low latency required to unleash the power of distributed sensing, processing, and trajectory planning. Mobility Underlying wireless connectivity must be indifferent to high mobility and dynamic network topology changes. Scalability Energy Real-time The wireless connectivity layer must cater for a large number of nodes. This is desired to extend coverage span and shorten time to complete a mission. The power budget of mechanical parts and onboard computational elements is going down. Wireless comm. should not be the bottleneck for energy consumption. Real-time live feeds from all nodes to the ground station with zero-perceived latency (ZPL). Necessary to allow proper command and control of the operation. 12
Shortcomings of LTE A study conducted by Insyab for a major regional telecom operator demonstrated clearly an LTE uplink capacity deficit during emergencies. This makes it risky to rely on LTE infrastructure for UAV swarms particularly in missioncritical applications. 13
Shortcomings of Wi-Fi Prone to interference from other systems 2.4 GHz is already crowded 5 GHz soon to be contaminated with the arrival of LTE-Unlicensed Does not scale well Many repeaters and infrastructure access points required to cover large areas Wi-Fi mesh supports only few hops Does not support mobility very well The underlying physical layer (PHY) was not built with mobility in mind Mobility-throughput tradeoff tends to be quite painful Wi-Fi modems are relatively power hungry Limited to ISM bands while many clients mandate support for other security and military bands The introduction of LTE-U (aka LAA) is expected to increase the interference temperature seen by Wi- Fi systems, causing heated debated between 3GPP and IEEE 802.11 communities. 14
AirFabric 15
How it works 16
Competitive edge Latency reduction Throughput per node AirFabric 4X AirFabric 2X Wi-Fi mesh 1X Wi-Fi mesh 1X Power savings Number of UAVs AirFabric Switched antenna array 7X AirFabric 4X Wi-Fi mesh 1X Wi-Fi mesh 1X 75% reduction in mission duration 40 50% higher resolution 17
Performance Advantages Highly resilient to interference Supports extreme mobility Up to 3X higher network throughput Highly scalable (100+ nodes) Ultra-low end-to-end latency (<5 ms) RF parameters configurable over-the-air Low-complexity FPGA-based design (50KLE) Severe interference Moderate interference Low interference 18
Performance Benchmarks Differentiated performance. Validated in the field. 19
Real-time Seamless Connectivity. Ahmed Bader, Ph.D. Managing Director Insyab Wireless M +966-545-316-774 T +1-415-800-3732 Ahmed@Insyab.com www.insyab.com https://ae.linkedin.com/in/ahmedbader