Unmanned aerial vehicles started out as a military technology, but now have applications in fields like agriculture, surveying, search and rescue, pipeline monitoring, emergency response, infrastructure inspection, and disaster relief. Trevor Perrott, CEO and co-founder of Censys Technologies, explains what it’s like to start and run an aerospace startup company, and its market niche in Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drones.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:38

Unmanned aerial vehicles started out as a military technology, but are now used in agriculture, surveying, search and rescue, pipeline, monitoring, emergency response, infrastructure inspection, and disaster relief. Welcome to Radio Cade . I'm your host Richard Miles. Today, my guest is Trevor Perrott, CEO, and co-founder of a UFA company called Censys Technologies in Daytona Beach, Florida. Welcome to Radio Cade, Trevor.

Trevor Perrott: 1:02

Thank you very much. Appreciate the opportunity and the platform.

Richard Miles: 1:06

So, I was getting a little bit of research on UAVs and I'm going to let you correct me to see how much, if it's I , I get right or wrong, but UAV's or drones is a lot of people refer to them now. And this dictatology has surprisingly been around a while in one form another, going back to the mid 19th century, 1849, when the Austrians used balloons loaded up with explosives to attack Venice. And then the concept was further developed also during war time, world war one, world war two, but it wasn't really until the 1990s and two thousands that UAV's started taking off so to speak. So now, we're at the point where Amazon can make drone deliveries of small packages, consumers, and I'm guessing one day my pizza and beer will arrive the same way in the backyard, should be great. But my point is that this has grown to be an incredibly competitive market. So tell us where Censys is positioned in the market. What are your current line of products and how do you plan to grow and succeed and what has got to be a huge and rapidly growing market?

Trevor Perrott: 2:02

Well, the only thing I'm going to correct you on is that Amazon still can't deliver packages. At least not at mass market. They've got some limited approvals to do some trial runs, but there's still quite the problem still exists. And proving, we call resilient communications, resilient, UAS operations. A lot of those mass market opportunities hinge on something that we call it, BVLOS, which is actually an acronym that stands for Beyond Visual Line of Sight. So BVLOS, kind of slurring it a little bit then to BVLOS, that's kind of where Censys position. We're in a very small segment of companies that has onboard detect and avoid technology, which what that does is our drones are able to look across the sky and identify potential collisions and then avoid those collisions before they encroach what's called a near miss. So, what was that to about a 4,000 feet or so is generally what we call a near miss. I think a lot of people kind of struggle with that spatial understanding that 4,000 feet is not a lot when objects are moving at hundreds of miles an hour. So it sounds big, but I promise that's actual