Drone Response partners with Oklahoma Dept. of Commerce for innovation hub
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Drone Response, an unmanned autonomous vehicle startup out of the University of Notre Dame, recently clinched a partnership with the State of Oklahoma Department of Commerce to establish an advanced software development and integrated engineering testing lab in Oklahoma.
The South Bend-based company plans to use the facility, set to open later this year, to test its drone management software platform.
The technology powering the startup was developed in the research lab of co-founder and Notre Dame faculty member Jane Cleland-Huang, a professor of computer science. Along with her team of software engineers and researchers, Cleland-Huang combined machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and other advanced technology to allow multiple drones to fly safely as a team and communicate with each other.
“It started because we were doing research in safety critical systems. A safety critical system is any software or hardware system that can cause harm to people if something goes wrong,” Cleland-Huang said. “About eight years ago when we were starting to look at this, drones were just coming into their own and people were starting to realize that drones are useful, for example, for emergency response, for pipelines inspection, and for many of those things.”
In 2020, one of the students in her research lab invited his dad to come on as an advisor. Three months later, Kelley Rich, head of the IDEA Center at Notre Dame, charged with moving student and faculty ideas from discovery to commercialization, asked Bill Reh to come on full time as co-founder and CEO of Drone Response.
“I agreed to do that and have been building the thesis for the company, changing the business plan to be bigger and bolder and global,” Reh said. “We’re getting ready for 2025 commercialization of our software platform called ARISE.”
The company’s AI-Responsive Intelligent Swarm Ecosystem (ARISE) coordinates swarms of drones that work in a collaborative manner, providing a level of situational awareness and threat detection not available from traditional ground-level approaches.
With more than 35 years working in artificial intelligence, Reh has been involved in six other startups and achieved two exits. The five-time CEO also has corporate experience with Reebok and ADP.
Once solely in the military domain, drone technology is now seen as a critical tool for first responders such as police, emergency medical systems and firefighters. Under Reh’s leadership, Drone Response is working on expanding its use cases.
“I wanted to focus on swarm intelligence, not only in emergency services, but also for law enforcement, Department of Defense applications, force protection, base protection, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and tracking,” Reh said. “Then we added two more application areas for the expanded thesis, energy and infrastructure use cases as well as smart agriculture.”
As part of her research, Cleland-Huang started working with the South Bend Fire Department to co-design a system where small, unmanned, aerial systems serve as full-mission partners for emergency response scenarios.
From her work with the fire department, Cleland-Huang was unimpressed with the amount of human direction the drones needed to function, so she set out to find an answer. Last year, along with her team, she developed a smart mission planner trained on large language models and generative pre-trained transformers to dynamically plan missions.
At its core, Drone Response is an enterprise software platform that runs on the drone, in the cloud and at the human operator level. The company decided to build its own payload stack as it became burdensome to find an open source flight controller that could meet all their specifications on time.
“Then there’s the AI autonomy stack, that’s a hardware device that is GPU computers, cooling fans, storage, payloads like sensors that plug into the drone itself,” Reh added. “Basically, this is the physical brain that the software resides in to do machine learning and AI and all its mission planning on each of the drones. It also allows the drones to communicate intelligently across the team or across the swarm.”
Since it is not a drone manufacturer, the company is currently working with manufacturers that use open source flight controllers like PX4 and ArduPilot to test their software. The need for year-round testing is one of the factors that attracted the company to Oklahoma.
Bill Reh talks about what the company’s operations in South Bend and Oklahoma will entail.
“Oklahoma has what’s known as skyway ranges to fly drones year round because of the more temperate climate, purpose built for drone testing, and demonstration in flying,” Reh said. “So while we’ll continue to do software development and work with the lab in Indiana year round, a lot of our physical world testing will be done in Oklahoma.”
Realizing the dampening effects it would have if drones begin to have accidents in the sky, Reh and his team are taking a safety-first approach. Drone Response runs millions of safety assurance simulations to train the technology, and the insights gleaned from these activities are then applied in the real world.
“It involves thousands of hours of testing our software to make sure that the AI is safe, trustworthy, predictable and has a societal level of acceptance so that it can be used in commercial settings,” Reh said. “The combination of running the simulation up in Indiana, with the physical world testing year round in Oklahoma, we think this is a perfect blend for our go-to market strategy.”
When he became CEO, Reh knew commercialization was still a few years away, but started doing groundwork to set the tone for the company’s success. He was looking for the best market in the U.S. catering to drone technology innovation. In the course of his inquiry, Oklahoma began to stand out both as a strategic partner and as an ecosystem partner.
“Oklahoma today, as I looked at that four years ago, had visions of doing that and now they’re really kind of walking the walk, if you will,” Reh said. “They have recently been awarded over $100 million by the federal government in the Build Back Better program to really develop and promote innovation in the areas of autonomy and AI for drones and UAVs.”
With the regulatory framework for drones still shaky, Reh said the company’s initial go-to market strategy does not rely on the federal government’s penchant for rulemaking.
“We want to be self-empowered as much as we can. The Department of Defense, the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, the Marines, and the Coast Guard, all play by their own rules because they create their own airspace,” Reh continued. “In emergencies, police and firefighters can very quickly get a waiver from the FAA to fly in deregulated zones within 10 minutes.”
This strategy has also landed Drone Response its first subcontract with Valkyrie Systems Aerospace, which recently won a SBIR Direct to Phase II award from the U.S. Air Force. The company will provide the command and control software for its new concept UAV vehicle for the Air Force, set to launch at the end of summer 2025.
“We’re getting validation that the approach we’re taking, an open architecture, modular approach, which means that we’re non-proprietary, works,” Reh said. “There’s a building block approach to our software stack, which is absolutely what our military partners want. They want something that’s called dual use, which means that it has commercial use for the military, but it also has commercial use for industry.”
Cleland-Huang is currently trying out new drone vendors as the company seeks to get a trusted partner that communicates well, delivers on-time, supports the weight of their autonomy stack and provides connections to the drone battery and flight controller.
“Now that we have our new autonomy stack, we’ve just ordered two new drones from a company called Inspired Flight in California and another company called Aurelia Aerospace in Las Vegas,” she said.
Cleland-Huang said the team recently received a patent for how dynamically configurable the Drone Response technology is.
“We can configure them for many different use cases, and if there’s a new use case, we can build new pieces and plug it in so the drone gets a new capability,” she added.
The company is now looking to raise a pre-seed round of about half a million dollars and has been running on research grant money to Notre Dame from NASA, the National Science Foundation as well as friends and family donations.
“We’re looking in Indiana, we’re looking in Oklahoma, and we’ll probably finish with a combination of capital partners from each area, seeing that economic development, workforce development will benefit both areas,” Reh said. “We think we have tremendous growth potential. But we’re only going to do business in states where private partnership is willing to invest in us as well.”
As they move towards commercialization, the company is focused on increasing its research, development and engineering teams.
“We have over seven years of software development into this platform and now the number one priority for us is building the engineering team and securing the local investment,” Reh said. “That will enable us to go do our seed round in the winter of 2025, where we plan to raise north of $5 million.”