Palladyne AI CEO on the Future of Autonomous Warfare

Marla (0:00)

Joining us now is Ben Wolff, President and Chief Executive Officer of Palladyne AI. Ben, thank you so much for being with us this morning. If you wouldn't mind just starting for our viewers, telling us a little bit about what it is that Palladyne AI does.

Ben Wolff (0:14)

You bet, thanks for having us, Marla. So Palladyne makes software that makes robots and drones smart enough to understand and react to their environment, to be able to work together as a team in real time, and operate without relying on the cloud.

Marla (0:29)

And so you mentioned robots and drones there. I mean, you are straddling two very different worlds with the same technology here. Why does it work across both the battlefield, but also in a manufacturing setting?

Ben Wolff (0:45)

Now, the same basic things that a robot needs to be able to do to perceive, reason and act in real time is consistent, whether it's on a factory floor or whether it's in the air looking for bad guys.

Marla (0:57)

Ben, I was reading one of your recent blog posts and you make an important distinction between unmanned and autonomous. I'd really love it if you could break down the importance of why people understand that distinction and why it's so important in your field and in the application of AI.

Ben Wolff (1:16)

You bet. Unmanned is remote control.

That means that the human is making all of the decisions for the robot or the drone. The human decides when, where, and how the machine is going to act. It really relies entirely on human intelligence to be able to script the machine or whatever its mission is going to be. When we talk about autonomy, we're talking about whether the robot itself has the capability to perceive, reason and act, basically make decisions in real time on its own without having to go ask a human for instruction or direction. That's important when you're talking about something that has to happen in a split second. It's important when you don't have communications to the robot like often happens on the battlefield.

Marla (2:01)

And so you're in industrial automation and also in defense autonomy. Both of those spaces are incredibly competitive right now. What is Palladyne's specific technological advantage?

Ben Wolff (2:13)

We've created software that allows us to operate on the edge. It actually gets embodied on the robot itself. It's able to use the compute power that is on the robot or the drone. And it doesn't require any connectivity back to the cloud. So the ability to have robots operating in contested environments, environments where there isn't communications, where you don't have a big data center that can feed directions to a machine, that's our secret sauce.

Marla (2:41)

And I know you've tested out this secret sauce. You were at the Army's IV mass exercise. You demonstrated this. What did that demonstration do or prove that existing drone control systems can't do?

Ben Wolff (2:56)

The big aha moment was when we were able to show a single soldier launching a swarm of drones, drones from different manufacturers, by the way, but all that had our software loaded onto those drones. And that single soldier was able to ask the entire swarm with a mission and then launch the drones, have the drones able to pursue their mission independently without requiring continuous human intervention or direction. So unlike a typical remote control of a single drone, where a human has to use joysticks to control the altitude and the direction and speed of the drone, in our case, the software was allowing the drones to work together as a team, each of them identifying information about what was going on on the battlefield, share that information and work collaboratively and more intelligently about how to achieve the mission objectives all while just being driven by a single soldier.

Marla (3:49)

And so Ben, they can clearly coordinate, but can they adjust to changing conditions? Can they make decisions independently or is the human still in control of that?

Ben Wolff (3:59)

That is the key. The drones actually make decisions on their own within the confines of the parameters that have been set by the human when the mission was launched. So the key is you don't have to have the human giving direction for each and every movement of the drone. They can decide what to do within the parameters they've been given.

Marla (4:17)

And Ben, how far out are you from being able to produce this at scale?

Ben Wolff (4:22)

We're able to do that now. So we're in the process of demonstrating it for the military. We're also in the process of demonstrating our automation software for factories with key clients and customers. And we expect to start driving revenues from those commercial products next year.