As is often the case, it all happened almost by accident or coincidence. At the beginning of the year, Ian Laffey, a 24-year-old, decided to take a break from the project he was working on (an artificial intelligence tool for email) and show up at a technology event in San Francisco. There he met two other engineers (Sacha Levy and Carl Schoeller) and they set out to break an unwritten but engraved rule, of Drones: Their Dependence on GPS.
The recent conflict in Ukraine has shown (again) how a country with fewer resources can overcome artillery shortages by resorting to cheap drones, but these require a GPS signal, which can be blocked.
So over the course of a couple of days, Ian, Sacha and Carl came up with a new system that would allow drones to locate where they were without having to rely on a signal transmitted from a constellation of satellites. The trick? Make The drone’s cameras take pictures and compare them to a Google image map databaseusing simple machine learning. Within 24 hours, the team had cobbled together a GPS-independent drone for less than $500.
“You can fit a lot of compressed maps on, say, a 256 gigabyte SD card if you compress them the right way… We can put, you know, more than 10,000 square kilometers”, explains Laffey in an interview. Uploading the maps takes just a couple of hours.
Laffey and his partners have created a company (Theseus) that is already working with a US Army Special Operations group to Test the drone in exercises and experimentsThere’s still a lot of work to do to make sure the system works over a wider range of altitudes and speeds, but those are solvable problems, Laffey notes.
Numerous discussions have also been held with representatives of the Ukrainian army, which has led them to adapt to the fact that the truth on the ground does not always match the static image.
“I mean, things blow up all the time in Ukraine,” Laffey says. “Houses just disappear… If you’re looking for a reference house and there isn’t one, what are you going to do?”
The biggest problem is that Theseus’ founders, being so young, are not accustomed to the research and scrutiny that comes with US Department of Defense money. The amount of paperwork, permits, legal clauses and dozens of entities Demanding to know all the parameters and specifications of the device can turn anyone away, but the military has relaxed its policy on technology purchases, according to the interview.
This would bring good news for experts, engineers, scientists and young entrepreneurs who could be designing the new objects of desire for the military forces.