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SAIF Systems wants to keep drones and other autonomous systems safe and on-task

Autonomous systems are likely to be an increasingly important part of everyday life in the future. 

Whether it’s self-driving cars on the roads, delivery drones in the sky, or robots in homes and workplaces, we’ll be seeing more machines left to their own devices to complete tasks thanks to advances in AI.

But how do we make sure they stay safe and on-task? That’s where a company like SAIF Systems comes in.

Imagine you’ve programmed a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle, AKA a drone) to fly via a specific route. But then something happens, like the weather changes, or the onboard computer gets confused, or its data link is lost. SAIF runs code on the UAV that keeps track of the situation and helps keep the flight on track and on mission.

“We run real-time, on-platform at the edge, and we don't require any form of data link to do that, which is what's really cool and novel about it,” says SAIF’s co-founder and CEO, Kyle Thomas.

“It means you can send off things like drones that don't have communication or have lost communication, and they can still do what they're supposed to do, and be guaranteed that they're going to do it right.”

The use cases are broad, taking in delivery drones, drones with live video feeds to inspect hard-to-reach critical infrastructure, and even defence contexts like battlefield drones that need to carefully navigate a complex, active theatre of war where certain areas must be avoided, or where certain equipment can’t be used over civilian populations.

In a geopolitically unstable world in which military chiefs are seizing the opportunities of battlefield automation, keeping those systems from going rogue can be critical for both public acceptance of such tech, and for avoiding mistakes that could make a tense situation worse.

The actions SAIF’s tech can take are varied, Thomas explains. For example, if a UAV loses an engine, SAIF can ensure that the optimal outcome is achieved. That could perhaps be a crash in a safe location, a destructive crash that ensures nothing can be recovered from the wreckage, or even a parachute deployment where appropriate. 

“Guaranteed?”

In our conversation Thomas and his fellow co-founder, SAIF’s CTO, Matthew Harris, use the word “guarantee” a lot. Guaranteeing their tech will work is a bold claim, but the pair believe it’s warranted.

“The great thing about our system is we can apply the same kinds of certification and assurance techniques to our software that are common in civil aviation,” says Harris.

The certification in question, DO-178C, is designed for system-critical software in aircraft.

“With that certification, you're only allowed a failure once every billion hours of flying, so it’s incredibly high reliability. We can design and certify our software to those same standards,” Harris adds.

The story so far

Thomas has a background in aviation, having previously been a Royal Air Force pilot for 15 years.

He says that in the final four years of his service, he became involved with research into autonomous aircraft that could conduct long-distance warcraft tasks without ongoing communication with base.

“The thing that stopped us actually using that at an operational capability and developing it further, was there was no way to assure that those novel controllers wouldn't do the things you didn't want them to do,” Thomas says.

“In testing, more than 50% of the time, at times, we saw them do undesirable things, even when we had other fail-safes built in.”

Thomas met Harris, a control systems engineer by background, when the latter was working at a company brought in to look at solutions to this problem for the RAF.

Then, after spending some time working together at that company after Thomas left the RAF, they decided to go into business together to tackle the problem that had brought them together in the first place.

“This is a really big problem for humanity as a whole, across both the civil sector and defence, in aerospace, on land, in maritime, in space itself. And we were pretty much sure we had a solution to that, that we could get intellectual property, and actually go after solving this problem,” says Thomas.

Incorporating the company just over a year ago, the pair worked with deep tech venture builder Cambridge Future Tech to get started and nail down the direction of the business.

While defence is a buzzy field in tech at the moment, SAIF anticipates only a third of its business coming from that sector, with the other two thirds coming from the civilian realm. To this end, they’re involved in a project looking at use cases in autonomous off-road vehicles for mining and agriculture.

They also plan to explore opportunities in space, such as autonomous satellite constellation management, and robots on space missions.

In Q3 next year, they aim to have their first commercial product on sale, targeting the drone market.

Following that, in 2026, they plan to launch a developer portal that will allow autonomous equipment manufacturers to buy and configure the software to their own ends. Thomas says, for example, customers could easily set a drone up to comply with European flight regulations.

A hardware module is also on the roadmap, for use in larger systems.

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