Mission Insight dashboard // Credit: images courtesy of Simulyze

While the underlying hype surrounding the U.S.’ drone industry appears irrefutable, today, the Federal Aviation Association (FAA) is still very much in the process of establishing laws to govern exactly how drones will navigate the skies. In this time of uncertainty and change, a small but growing cohort of tech companies are hoping they can remedy the FAA’s indecision through the creation of new software.

Key to this issue of mass drone adoption, among other things, is answering the question of how government can track and ultimately regulate the flight paths of drones due to safety concerns—in 2014 a drone almost crashed into the turbine engine of a passenger jet carrying 50 people.

It goes without saying but: significant and numerous hurdles must be overcome and laws decided upon before widespread drone usage likely becomes a reality. Should all commercial drones, for example, be required to carry trackable RF chips? These are the sorts of tough questions that are most conveniently solved by the advent of new technologies. Enter: Simulyze, a 16-year-old defense and intelligence contractor that has long developed software for military command centers.

In February, Simulyze ventured into the consumer market by targeted the burgeoning drone industry as its access point.

The local company has created a graphic user interface to help operators understand, analyze and organize information related to the realtime movement of drones in a given area. The interface is sold as a software product available via the cloud or for on-site download.

Identity

Reston, Va.-based Simulyze describes itself as a “leading commercial off the shelf (COTS) provider of data analysis, correlation, integration and visualization products.” This translates to offering clients some degree of “operational intelligence,” otherwise described as a virtual 3D map of sorts with data about the location/placement, movement and condition of units in an environment, among other things. These trackable units could be tanks or military personnel entering into a combat zone, but in this case we’re talking about a new product build by Simulyze aimed specifically at drones, called Mission Insight .

The Mission Insight software platform takes in a fusion of data from hundreds of sources—like geospatial and terrain data, social media mentions, intelligence sources, RF chip scans, and realtime GPS location and temperature enabled by a internet-connect sensors physically attached to the vehicle—to produce a comprehensive understanding of where a drone is located and what it is doing in the given airspace. This technology market is known as UAS or unmanned aerial systems, as it include not just the UAV but also all of the software and hardware that supports it.

To be clear: Simulyze is the developer of a software platform and does not produce the aforementioned sensors themselves. Instead, the company has worked to integrate thousands of different data sources, regardless of the quality of that information or its standard format.

Got data streams?

In an interview with DC Inno, Simulyze revealed a few of the data streams/sensors that its platform digests. They include: “sensory data, weather, Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking, social media data, video metadata (not live footage), radar intelligence (RADINT), transmitted UAV data, imagery databases (think Google earth for compiling an environment background) and signals intelligence (SIGINT).”

The company, however, declined to provide a full list of integrated sensors and feeds, citing “proprietary [assets] and other factors.”

In the future, Simulyze will look to integrate data from ADS-B transmitters, which are typically used for commercial avionics, along with realtime video capture—either via the drone’s camera or its operator—according to CEO Kevin Gallagher.

Gallagher added that it’s also possible his company will license a version of its API so that developers can create apps with drone tracking features. Equally, he hopes to partner with numerous Internet-of-Things (IoT) device companies so that Simulyze can ingest more realtime information related to internet-connect vehicles and devices.

Gallagher hopes that Mission Insight will one day act as the go to drone management dashboard; used by various industries who will naturally benefit from the development of other drone hardware and operations. These early customers, Gallagher explained, may include energy companies, especially those who will one day use drones to survey drilling facility in remote locations.