What Trust Means for Drones in the Highway in the Sky

Luke Fox on Mar 30, 2021

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Bringing together leaders, lawmakers and lawbreakers. Host Luke Fox explores how innovations in business and technology are redefining our trust in security measures.

Trust plays a huge role in technology and with the growing capabilities of drones for delivery. To understand the role of trust in managing the highway in the sky, The Trust Revolution host Luke Fox spoke with Ken Stewart, President and CEO of NUAIR (Northeast UAS Airspace Integration Research Alliance).

“The idea is a commercial model for UTM that’s scalable and economically viable. We’re working on healthcare delivery as a focus. How can we use drones to do this safely and efficiently?” – Ken Stewart

Stewart has an impressive background, working in wireless telecom, cloud-based software, and federated platforms. Stewart shared how trust shaped his pre-NUAIR career. He worked on a third-party, independent clearinghouse for mobile carriers. “It was a trusted platform in the industry that was able to authenticate and authorize and eventually became big in fraud detection, too.”

Another critical role was working on democratizing the network spectrum on demand, which exposed him to working with the FTC. “We devised a way to share it in real-time, and that led to spectrum for autonomous systems.”

Stewart led a GE aviation company relating to remote IDs or license plates for drones. “There’s a lot to putting drones in the air, and we had to create a trust network with diverse groups that different objections,” he added.

A lot of information and data exchange occurs in spectrum usage, and a trusted partnership was difficult because not all users or their data had verification.

With NUAIR, Stewart now has a new vision for the commercialization of drone use cases. “We operate a test site for the industry to test applications. It’s flexible air space the FAA allows us to provide access,” he shared. Users gather data, test ops over people, and design concepts.

They also surveil a 50-mile traffic area, gathering important data to support the commercialization efforts of drone delivery. “The idea is a commercial model for UTM that’s scalable and economically viable. We’re working on healthcare delivery as a focus. How can we use drones to do this safely and efficiently?”