Daedalean reveals partnership with Reliable Robotics

On March 22, 2021, two companies–Daedalean and Reliable Robotics–announced their new partnership to build advanced navigation and situational awareness (SA) systems for commercial aircraft operations. With the new certifiable technology, onboard or remote pilots will benefit from next-generation flight automation systems. The proprietary solution enables onboard pilots and remote pilots to make faster, better-informed decisions based on the advanced sensors provided by the system.

Reliable Robotics is a leader in aircraft automation. During the last months, they demonstrated pioneering capabilities of their systems by remotely piloting a Cessna 208 Caravan from a control centre in their headquarters over 50 miles away. In 2019, the company made aviation history operating a remotely piloted Cessna 172 Skyhawk over a populated region with no one on board and subsequently demonstrated a fully automated landing of the larger Cessna 208 in 2020 on the third day of flight testing.

Daedalean’s systems can now feed this information about the aircraft position relative to the terrain with its obstacles and safe landing sites and relative to other traffic, to the Reliable Robotics flight control stack, which then has at its disposal an additional layer of safety and can use it to deal with multiple contingencies such as jammed or disabled GPS, non-cooperative traffic, or emergency landing scenarios.

The end product both companies foresee is a system that can operate in airspaces as a model citizen, that enables denser economic use of the airspace, at safety levels that are an order of magnitude above today’s standards.

“Reliable Robotics has the most credible system for remotely piloted operations with immediate applications for cargo operators,” said Luuk van Dijk, Founder and CEO of Daedalean. “Our team has developed advanced machine learning that can adapt to the inherent uncertainties in airspace and increasing levels of onboard autonomy. Bringing our core competencies together was a logical next step to jointly develop a solution set that makes aircraft safer.”

“Both companies have been built on the principle that certification is paramount from day one,” said Robert Rose, Co-founder and CEO of Reliable Robotics. “Daedalean is the recognized leader when it comes to developing machine learning systems within the required regulatory framework. This is not a domain where you build something first and then figure out how to certify it later.”