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About the project

About Christian Wickham 

The founder of PROWL, Christian Wickham, is based in Adelaide, South Australia. He has over 30 years of experience in the IT industry, including 22 years of experience at executive leadership level – running IT departments and on Boards. He was the CIO for the Naval Shipbuilding College in the Defence industry. He holds a BA in IT, an Executive MBA, and Cybersecurity and Risk qualifications from Harvard University.

As a Neurodiverse individual, Christian has exceptional problem solving and innovation skills.

Our journey and roadmap

The plans for the PROWL project are just starting.

A strategic roadmap outline is below

Design, assessment and setupPre-seed

Getting started with PROWL by assessing the market, creating budgets, designing the technical solution

Next is to create legal structures and the business, engaging with stakeholders and finding investors and support.

Proof of concept and initial marketingSeed

Technical development of a POC to take to drone vendors and regulatory authorities.

Probing the market to build interest through marketing and engagement.

Developing legal agreements with third party data providers or consumers.

Engage with customers for feedback

Minimum viable productSeed

Build a working version to engage with customers and allow evaluation and pilot trials.

Establish relationships with drone manufacturers to use the PROWL system.

Engagement with authorities to ensure compliance and influence regulatory change.

Engage with early adopters with a beta program. Work with consumers, drone manufacturers / planning software, industry, and regulators.

Initial Version 1 – Series A

Monitor and scale the product to ensure customers’ needs are met.

Monitor load on systems, tune AI, review for errors and bad submissions, assess future growth curves.

Obtain growth funding and further investment.

Expand marketing to selected regions for drone usage to hobbyists and selected commercial and industrial markets.

Version update and growthSeries B

Release new features based on feedback.

Engage more external data sources, review legal agreements.

Obtain growth funding and further investment.

Expand marketing to wider area, expand to usage beyond drones into additional markets, regions, and usage.

Market criticalityIPO

Solidify organisation, legal structures, and international footprint.

Identify partnerships and opportunities for growth.

Initial Public Offering or Aquisition/Merger.

Continued growth and market penetration.

Hazard Types

Hazard Types

A – Fixed – Structure or solid object where the drone should not get closer than 0.5m from the object (e.g. building, cliff, installation)

B – Object – wind movable hazard where the drone should allow 1m tolerance around the object in case it moves (e.g. power line, tree, flag, antenna)

C – Corridor – area with unpredictable traffic with 2m tolerance left around the area – to allow for large trucks or trains (e.g. train/tram lines, highways or roads, air corridor)

D – Do not fly over – area where flight is not permitted by law, such as with an official 2.5km exclusion at ground level, 8km at 120m altitude (e.g. airport, military/government location, firing range). Only commercial users and authorities can submit data in this category and this category is considered to be at the highest trust level.

E – Exclusion zone – fly-over not permitted due to privacy request, 50m exclusion of the polygon area to be honoured (e.g. nudist beaches, private residences, concerts & events – by request only, can be ignored by official government / military / safety & security / Police). Expires every 36 months if not renewed, can be specified to expire any time within the 36 month auto-expiry

F – Fan or air movement, requiring 2m exclusion of hazard (e.g. air conditioner condenser, extraction fans, chimneys, wind turbines, volcano, known thermal rises) could also be area of signal interference / blackspot / no GPS signal

G – Ground Hazard – area where landing would be hazardous, 10m altitude max for polygon (e.g. lake, river, power substation, inaccessible area such as wilderness or wasteland, zoo)

H – Temporary – hazard that does not always exist – 200m exclusion of polygon to be assumed (e.g. construction crane, temporary structure)

I – ICAO flight plan, or other local jurisdiction flight plans

J – reserved for future use

K – Other hazard

L – Land level – the location of the ground level. This is the only hazard type submission that can be a single point with just Longitude, Latitude and Altitude.

Simple to use

Simple to use

The PROWL system has all the logic built in to it. All your planning software needs to do is access the service with the following parameters;

The starting Longitude
The starting Latitude
Your username
Your password
Your query type

Then the PROWL system will then respond with the GPS vertices of polygons that are within the 50 metre tile of your requested co-ordinates – in GeoJSON. Each polygon represents an object or hazard, is categorised and tagged, and may have been submitted by another user, or available from an existing online source.

Your flight planning software (or the drone, if it is supported) can then plan the flight path around the objects that PROWL has revealed.

The response from PROWL will be a series of GPS location points, with a label to indicate the object type, and other tags that the data provider has submitted. The small amount of data in the response allows drones with limited computing power and storage to handle the mapping path assessment.

Microtransactions

Microtransactions

Lookups that give a result will be charged from just 10 cents. Tiny transactions give a great benefit, so if you get a result that means you need to re-plan your route, a repeat lookup for a new location is not expensive!

Registering of company

I am pleased to announce that Drone PROWL was registered in Australia!

The next step is to make this site fantastic, and generate some interest and investment!

Welcome to PROWL

You’ve found it! This might just be exactly what you are looking for…

What is Drone PROWL?

The Planning and Routing Object Warning Locator service provides a reference database of all physical hazards and objects in the real world, so that they can be avoided by pilot-less vehicles such as drones, UAVs, RPAs etc.