Governed Autonomy: Why Edge AI Needs Guardrails

This podcast is presented by NX AI, your partner for time series foundation models and physical AI. Hi there welcome to a new episode of the Industrial AI Podcast. my name is Peter Sieberg an I'm you're host today. i'm going to be talking to Steven Yates.

he's the co-founder and CTO at Federand. Steve and I are gonna be talking about governed autonomy for HAI. hi Stephen Hi, good morning Peter. Thanks for having me on.

you welcome please introduce yourself to our listeners. hi so yes i have. uh i'm steve yates. I have thirty eight years of experience professionally in embedded and edge computing industrial controls.

actually though before that I started building computers forty nine years ago at the age of fourteen. so forty-nine Fourteen yeah, sorry. It's been a long time. it's easy to lose track.

So I'm an engineer by training formerly hardware engineer at Intel and GE Fanok before founding my Hardware design house ADI engineering which i bootstrapped over Time from a pure service company into a high volume White Label, white box rather private labeled OEM serving customers tier one telecoms and computer OEM's. that was acquired by Silicon back in twenty fifteen. And I'm a registered professional engineer in the state of Virginia an IEEE senior member and hold twenty US patents.

I co-founded Federent back about a year and half ago with my longtime friend and colleague Tony Masters, who is CTO actually. Forty nine years experience that's a lot. we're not going to be talking about each of those stages were gonna probably concentrate on the final stage off the one you've been talking today. but i do wanna start actually with going back and not sure what the numbers of years are.

you don't have to share that. but I do want a talk about. PLC's and when it's all about specifically designing them. because thats one thing is that you did at G E fanook.

i think he mentioned in an iraq somewhere that specifically your involved or u were, the designer of this system. Ninety, thirty tell us about how that was? What what's that designing that PLC at their time?" Yeah so actually I was early in my career a hardware design engineer at GE Fanuc and i did work on A couple.

more specifically I was helping to design ASICs for GE Fanucc for PLC, CPU and IO modules including the ninety thirty and ninety seventy. So I think it's very interesting actually to have that kind of perspective kind of experience because I think we're seeing things now with AI entering the physical world, entering into critical industries where frankly i think the industry has forgotten about some of the foundational design principles that kept industrial systems safe and reliable.

And trustworthy and I think it's urgent. but actually the industry get back to those. so you know some other thing are just authority autonomy determinism have to live locally, they can't be dependent on a link or connection. Or cloud service for other things that aren't guaranteed in the real world.

and so you know with a PLC Determinism an authority I use word governance by I use it a little differently than a lot of other people, especially in the age of AI user. But you know all these things lived literally in the same cabinet even on the same rack. they didn't live off site They weren't separated by link. The system was safe and correct By design free from external dependencies.

And that's just bedrock principle That at an age of Ai industry has forgotten about. And I probably have been one of those persons who did forget, if you ask my co-producer Robert... You know? those persons forgotten the basics of.

And that's why we're talking about them now, one more thing. you mentioned Intel as well and I've been with Intel as Well. Now That's not. but The reason for coming quickly back to that maybe is?

We talk a bit OTI all the time and haven't being part of it until myself and i have Been Talking About Gordon Moore and that was A Time Of More Aswell. and always going back to the four thousand. for now i think that they were talking is ninety seventy five. And then I was thinking who was first IT or OT.

so I would say, birth of it was a four thousand four microprocessor now. and then I went back and found out and assume you maybe can share little bit with us there. that I understand. at the first PLC was dick molly's.

modicon is zero eight four now that was for general motors i understand maybe you can share but what I understand, battled. No, no that's okay. I've actually learned to embrace my experience and an age starting a an edge AI company. i think it's an asset so i don't hide it.

i'm not offended. uh no to be clear when i was designing or helping PLC CPUs at GE Phanik. The purpose of the ASIC wasn't to replace a microprocessor, in fact... the NINED-E-THIRTY had a uh..

three eighty six class processor from Intel in it as the main CPU! The PLC was really. there were several PLCs and you know these memories are a bit dusty so I may get some of the details wrong but You know, some were just responsible for system control memory. Control I O control.

but a lot of the functionality that was really important was interfacing to the backplane two other IO modules or Other Modules rather inside Of The the ninety thirty Backplane System. so they Were Implementing What At The Time We're Proprietary GE Fanic Communications Protocols and Backplane Interfaces. So But I think you're right, the four thousand for and actually have to say really quick when i was at Intel they celebrated their twentieth anniversary. And there is quite a celebration of that event actually back then.

one other things that intel produced with a poster that was hung up every facility that had the name of every Intel employee. And it was, I can't tell you as someone who started building computers at thirteen what an incredible moment It Was to see my Name At The Very End and very small print but on the same sheet Of Paper As Ted Hoff An Andy Grove Robert Noyce Gordon Moore All of the other Titans of the industry founded and built Intel. That was quite the moment we can talk for hours, which I'll do this sometime when Uh, which means I probably was not there at the twenties.

So you may have been a little bit before me. Yeah we can show he can spend hours on that amazing time That then you and also i A Little Bit Later Spent With Those Guys. Yes Let's Come Back To You Gave A Quick Introduction And Tell Us About Exactly The Authority. You Use The Word Governments?

And You Use It Exactly For This Shop Floor OT Architecture with the PLC in the center and how that kept. And it still keeps, I assume you know, ninety nine percent of all of our installed based production authority local. yeah so i do use the word governance. And I've tried to come up with a different word or better words just to avoid confusion, but frankly i haven't been able To Come Up With A Better One Yet.

So in The Age Of AI When Most People Use The Word Governance They're Talking About Sort of Corporate Boardroom Type Governance AI Ethics and you Know Corporate Policy Compliance And Things Like That. when I Talk about it...I'm talking runtime governance at the point of action. It really means enforcing policies, making sure that operational boundaries are not exceeded External dependency and external dependency again includes constant connectivity to some sort of a cloud control plane.

If you look at how Edge AI is architected today, usually what's partitioned to the edge in what runs it? The edges inference And that's wonderful. It's great innovation. I don't mean to be negative about it In the least but inference Is not same as governance You know, a system and there's numerous examples of this that are starting to emerge.

It still kind of early days for industrial and physical AI That make consequential decisions in the real world but There is numerous analysts reports that point To us as major an urgent issue And we're starting actually see some real incidents that Are occurring In The Real World As A Result Of It. So Kindof. the idea Is That operational boundaries have to be enforced at the point of action, not at the far end of a link. And this becomes especially urgent as operational decisions are no longer deterministic.

they can actually evolve independently from other nodes that fleet scale or independently from the cloud. prompting is not governance. we've seen numerous and I can go into details if you want where prompts don't assure safety and so There is the need for architectural enforcement that the system just can't override like a PLC. I do want to go into more detail there, but share with us...

I could do that because i've been talking you know ads for five years from your experience as the development of the architecture. Why have we been moving? maybe sometimes instead? five years ago, especially in Europe?

Nobody wanted to go cloud because they were always that. That's what we call it until I'm not sure if that's a term you had at the time or crown jewels so your You wouldn't put your crown jewels outside, so to say. i think there's been all of that has been changing A lot but nevertheless tell us why are We Why have? why has the market been moving to Edge, maybe in addition to cloud?

And then let's move into what potential problem we may be introduced by doing that. Yeah oh yeah there are many different motivations for the industry. latency and data sovereignty in geolocation concerns resilience but there's others as well. right.

numerous times you know we just can't afford around trip to a data center. In terms of energy in terms of time, in terms cost or even just coverage. so edge AI specifically when I talk about Edge anymore have along history and networking an edge compute Any more, my brain when you talk about Edge just immediately goes to edge AI. It's really about solving tough problems where a cloud-first architecture isn't suitable.

if you look at how AI has evolved And it's a wonderful thing. I am not being critical, It has evolved in the cloud centric way and hyperscalars running enlarge AI data centers. That is a wonderful architecture for what i call digital AI that exists on the information domain as chatbots and LLMs its corporate tools design tools coding tools right? We all use them all of time foundational to the success of AI.

So it's a wonderful thing, but you know hyperscale data centers have. well I hate to use the word perfect. The engineer in me hates that word But indulge Me A little. You Know they Have as close To Perfect Connectivity As You Can Get They Have You Know Assured Power Nearby Or On-Site Support Technicians Essentially Pristine Sort Of Laboratory Grade Environments Where the real world doesn't rear its ugly head very often and you know that's fine if what your building is a customer support tool or chatbot something like.

But we have UAVs are autonomous robots on infield robot in agriculture, military systems for autonomous hall trucks. remote mines were taking An architecture that was developed for office applications and deploying it in pit mines or battlefields. And you know, you certainly wouldn't move your office into the middle of a pit mine or a battlefield. So why are we moving our Office AI architectures there?

Let's look at a couple of examples. maybe take us by hand and tell us Why not? what is happening? What have We been doing without real life web with out?

Not everybody but You Know Maybe including myself realizing What it is that we have not taken care of. and maybe if you start with one example That has been completely obvious to me. It must've been like fifteen years ago I think was University of Stuttgart, they were showing this Example running the shop floor through a cloud. You know i really say fifteen may be twenty And everybody said oh that's impossible!

You cannot do that If there are small glitches in network. Maybe thats an example where we are not sort of what we're doing. And maybe you can explain that, What happens to authority and governments by moving to the edge? So when authority and runtime governance live in a cloud...

When access to the Cloud is not available for whatever reason right it's an outage under your network providers SLA. It's you know an authentication problem or even a count problem logging into the cloud. Its some force majeure, it is real world rearing its ugly head. in those cases your AI can still run inference workloads at the edge but now this non-deterministic AI is operating essentially on its own independently and I point to some specific examples, but let me just explain generally first.

So you know it makes decisions its state evolves based on inputs, based on data and circumstances across a fleet of nodes, states become divergent. And you know there's no way right now - no standard way to reconcile those divergent States upon reconnection to make sure that operational decisions are within allowable or safe limits. and this problem is becoming actually again. we're at early days of it but the problem Urgent the EU AI act in August now just a few months away requires high impact systems to keep continuous logging Continuous attestation.

In terms of Decisions AI makes to allow for continuous human oversight. There's no allowances. four ninety nine point nine percent. network SLAs which sound good on the surface, but essentially it's an admission that you're zero point one percent.

non-compliant with EU. I act doesn't have provisions or force major. by the way its like me saying i'm only gonna be reading my phone Zero point one percent of the time while driving. it's absurd on its face and Right, but no.

No my driving has to be correct by design. I have to just not use my phone while driving period. It doesn't matter how little or how much? Is that needs to be zero?

so there are some examples Actually, and I have an upcoming article coming out. probably can't say where because it hasn't been published yet But you know in the next few months. a couple of examples. I point out in that are One there was a BHP mine In Queensland Australia Where an autonomous haul truck actually lost connectivity with central controller?

An operator exited the haul truck. The haul truck then reestablished connectivity Around that time resumed motion and actually collided with an excavator. now fortunately no one was injured in. there wasn't serious property damage but that transition from connected.

And governed to unconnected and uncovered and back led the mine truck. two autonomously decide to resume motion, and that resulted in a collision because it's operation wasn't govern. there was nothing you know limiting its actions and saying that uh... that wasn't unsafe action.

And this is the type of scenario that is. according to a deloitte survey or rather white paper, what's just published called i think it was physical ai moment of acceleration came out couple months ago. it's great read. they've identified this governance gap as key element that is about to become a major issue with physical AI and of course physical AI as I that makes consequential decisions in the real world.

you know it touches atoms are not in an nuclear sense but enough physical sense. And they've said that governance isn't emerging. dimensioned at has not been solved yet. well wait a minute.

g phoenix solve it with PLC's. admittedly there weren't any right edge. AI didn't exist. but G fanix saw this, Decades ago.

the industry solved this. the industry solve this probably starting in the nineteen fifties. I mean there was relay logic that controlled industrial machines decades before. There were such things as microprocessors and i get it right.

thats not a i its little bit apples to oranges comparison, But the thing is, the requirements for The Real World haven't changed over those decades. If my Claude query fails... I can just retry it. It's an inconvenience.

recently there was a software startup, i believe their name is pocket OS. this is public information well known story where AI and agentic AI workload actually deleted Their entire production environment because it decided autonomously. that Was a good idea even though? It was prompted specifically not to take any destructive actions.

It decided to. Now, you know that was kind of a I'm sure oh crap moment. fortunately they were able to restore it from the backup. but an environmental release can't be restored from a back up and injury Can't be rolledback A severe economic loss because a plant shut down or chemical reaction The control mechanism stopped.

Well their reaction doesn't stop Right. So the needs of the real world haven't changed, what's changed is how The industry now is starting to control it and It's being built on an architecture that just was built for office applications And not repeat myself That Is the gap. in a nutshell All right so let's move towards a solution. just so I don't forget you mentioning the EU AI Act.

Yes, we have not always been hearing So many good things about this act but it's interesting and i'm sure You didn't start with what. we will be listening to your company and you are thoughts. I'm sure they have been coming as day came, but then... you must've seen somewhere that is expecting exactly today's not available in the market.

so tell us What is that? where do you see the solution to a problem? but you've been describing. Yeah and by the way, I'm certainly not on the law lawyer i am not an attorney uh...

and i'm not in expert on the e-u-a-i act but it isn't worthy of this. Is becoming an issue and there's similar regulations that are starting to emerge not just within u but i think certainly in the U.S.. And soon globally.

So I'm sorry, could you repeat the question? Yeah. Yeah, but yeah. But I'm looking forward to hear from you.

what is the solution as you said specifically? You do like the edge and it's...you're not against that at all! but your pointing towards this problem we have of governance off....

I am not sure if i can put in my word..i think its almost like If all these edges are little islands. they are connected to a central place, to a cloud. And if one of these islands get disconnected and you gave an example off the truck suddenly it starts doing its own thing because is not coordinated anymore.

maybe that's in my words I don't know. so what does this solution with your company are coming up? Yeah i think there're four key capabilities form the solution. It's not just one thing, it's multiple things working in concert.

so first of all is the idea of local policy enforcement and another way to look at that is local boundary enforcement something that the system can't override... Something that's baked into the architecture And you know essentially to replace the PLC or I shouldn't say replace scratch. that word augment Edge AI PLC's will retain a place but the issue is that edge agents can actually make autonomous decisions that PLCs cant govern. A plc looking at actions would see individual actions that may still fall within boundaries it has been programmed to enforce, but an operational system level overall consequence of those action something unsafe.

So local policy enforcement, architecturally that the system can't override. That's number one. Number two is cryptographic decision attestation... that basically proves what happened at the point of action not dependent on external things or cloud access or networks or anything else.

so cryptographic Decision Attestation Model ran what model made a decision. What policy authorized that decision to be made? What was state when that was made? the third thing is, operational boundaries at the point of action.

And, fourth thing is reconciling that upon reconnection. so partition aware reconciliation state. when there's divergent states this becomes a large-scale autonomous systems problem. Partition aware reconciliation of divergent States upon reconnections.

and none of these matters unless easy to deploy reliable secure the types of industries that were mainly serving right now in our early days a federal. our critical remote industries and agriculture. so these are environments that are austere where there is very limited ii or it support nearby. And so the systems have to be solutions have to easy to deploy remotely manageable and by the way remotely manageable.

I know im implying cloud. let me clarify a little bit, About cloud. I am not anti-cloud. I am NOT anti telco, right?

i'm Anti dependency and i'm anti Misapplication of architectures to areas they were never designed To apply too. That's what I'm against. The cloud is actually essential, it's fundamental to even we are doing but we're recasting the role of Cloud a bit at the far edge to become augmenting and not blocking, to become optimizing instead of time-critical dependency. that is necessary and reliable decisions at the real world.

so that is what we're saying needs to happen as the role of cloud doesn't even need to be totally redefined. there's a missing layer. these things at the edge and that's essentially what federant is building, we could talk about a little more. Tell us about that, tell us about Fadrant.

I'm going to ask you specifically when i sort of word faderent again last night When we talked about this thing comes into my brain like industrial great Boris Scheringer who believe introduce that term. we met last night and talked about also again specifically here. About federal connections. so when will you talk about for example germany?

it's the federal republic of germany, i mean that the algorithm is coming to your data close maybe on the edge rather than sending the data into the cloud. Now your reaction is saying, maybe it's not related but you tell us about fadrant. when did you start fadrant? and then I think we hear what It Is.

You're Saying What Your Working On Today And Then Maybe Going To The Specific Solution That After The Problem We Are Talking About. So it's interesting what you said about federal AI in Germany. I wasn't aware of that so thanks i'll have to actually study that. read about the fact that our company is named federant.

maybe as Bob Ross used say he has a happy little accident. It's not purposeful but may be its self signal right? The reason that the idea for Federant, or the name for Faderent rather is we're federating operational governance with the Edge. With connectivity and with operational ease.

so we are federating things. We are the one who federates edge AI therefore federant. That's just kind of where it came from. Plus you know, logistics show silly things.

The domain was open and it looked like we could get trademarks which we have now. so... It passed our legal due diligence! So the idea came well..

We started at unofficially as actually an extension of a personal project I was building about two years ago. i'm a long time starlink user. i have some remote property where i've had starlink for four years actually have a good german car sprinter sprinter van i guess if you can call the sprinter a car. I'm gonna ask very specifically what's going to do later.

but tell us now because i read about that and being a camper myself, i read this about this post on your. go into as much details little as u want an Although it's about styling the styling dish and I was looking into going for a starling as a camper as well. Tell us your experience. an although that is i believe in the experience has a consumer so to speak, do you believe all of us?

because idea understand what dad did to you in a private environment and exactly how exactly same way that could do specific things in a business environment? Yeah, so you know I love the outdoors. Love camping, love seeing things and i need to stay in contact...I sometimes work remotely right.

that's the wonderful thing about how you build a company in twenty-twenty six although frankly I built my first company in the nineties remote. we were ahead of our time but connectivity is key And even in developed nations, I just posted a blog post about how i went to the EU Embassy Open House tour last week and standing on embassy row. back to the Metro. I had literally walk inside The Hungarian Embassy and use their guest network To find the nearest metro station, which is amazing.

So that's amazing. people would have thought it wouldn't be the other way around right? Yeah yeah i Had to rely on a foreign government connectivity in the capital of the u.s..

To Find my Way to A metro Station. And you know this Is the Network That We're Building Edge AI On as a critical dependency. Anyway, so my sprinter I've had our first generation flat high performance dish on the roof of my Sprinter. uh i can share notes about how I did that.

you know offline if you're interested. it's a little off topic for this but I installed it myself. I actually put a hole in the roof Of My Sprinter. You Know Which Was A Frot Moment Sealed It Up.

You Know All Is Good It Hasn't Leaked It Works! I Have A Solar Panel Up There. and So You know, Starlink was a fantastic way to provide connectivity anywhere. But as I found out after installing it...

Anywhere means anywhere other than parked under a tree or parked under balcony or driving under bridge in tunnel and any other obstruction. And the obstruction can actually be surprisingly light Or small. It doesn't have to be thick tree canopy, it can be wispy pines. You know frankly I'm not an expert in terms of the communications but there's broadcast-based satellite services, you know direct TV or Sirius XM.

The modulation order is higher and so forth right? So the link is less resilient. now Starlink has a wonderful invention. I'm big fan of using it.

for years. It's continued to get better as more satellites have launched but still... You know i was camping recently in central Florida And there was a light canopy of pines tall sort of wispy pine trees, not like furs but you know they only have pine needles at the very top. They're common in Florida and even with that I could see blue sky uh...

Even with that i got Again, this is my highest performance Starlink dish with the best business plan they offer. With a guaranteed SLA I got a ninety three point six percent ping rate which was perfectly adequate for office use or Claude used for email web browsing. Perfectly perfectly adequate you know, six point four percent of the time. I didn't have a connection and those outages ranged from seconds or actually they range from tenths of second but they were ten fifteen twenty thirty fifty seconds right?

And so is ubiquitous, but it's not as reliable. It doesn't have old school telco grade reliability." The Starlink SLA for business service is ninety-nine point nine percent which sounds good and again its an amazing thing that they've invented and deployed. But if you read the fine print, the ninety-nine point nine per cent excludes outages under sixty seconds.

They don't count at all. A fifty-nine Second outage doesn't even show up as an SLA violation and of course like all SLAs it excludes force majeure. So snow on the dish, heavy rains causing rain fades. Obstructions...

The fact that your installation is under some sort or not even under there's an obstruction in the field of view. those things aren't covered. and so that got me thinking okay you know it's ubiquitous but not as reliable as terrestrial. this is connectivity many remote industries are going to rely on.

The reliability will continue to get better with more satellites, but it's never going to be one hundred percent. and the point is that this isn't a connectivity problem that industrial AI is facing at the edge you know? And I think the industry is looking at it primarily as a connectivity. And so that's where the idea from federal came from a personal project and i thought about very convincing yeah interesting how you say.

not always do you have connectivity at all and for that reason i was looking also at starling. oh by the way, I could tell you this one moment when we were camping. yeah. And we saw these...

We believe we were being invaded by your marshmen. and what they where? They wear these Starlings but come in a row of twenty and we were camping, I really thought that was being invaded. it's a completely different topic.

We have so many topics to be talking about offline. yeah i've seen the startling train before. its little unsettling. if you didn't know what is was...

it would be a little unsettling. now tell us more platform? How that is different from cloud anchored solutions, what are the different modules you have. What's this solution providing to solve a problem we talk about?"

Yeah! So there're three elements of the solution and let me also add real quick open source is important for us as a company. I think it's important to the industry as a foundation to build on. So two of the three products are actually open source, or maybe I shouldn't call them products too.

Two of the elements in the platform our open-source and you know i'll be blunt we've had a great conversation right they're not. We're Not Open. Washing Them. These Are Legitimately Open Source To Try To Enable The Industry.

The open source elements are actually being promoted and provided under the base called FEDERON, you know kind of like a particle federation if you will. Like a neutron or electron. So so Federon is the brand of our edge resident hardware in software that has opened. now there's two elements to that.

There was a Hardware component And a Software and firmware Component. Hardware isn't or custom, I should say. optimized hardware isn't a hundred percent mandatory for the solution to work. But to get the most out of it is very helpful and we couldn't find off-the-shelf hardware that had right combination of features, and I could be happy to describe what they are.

So after having built and bootstrapped and survived the acquisition of my hardware company achieving a soft landing i kind of swore to myself i wouldn't do another hardware company. but so yeah... But we're having two! is our rugged open hardware reference design?

it's a production ready. Reference design and reference architecture. we are developing at home, we are producing units for people that want to buy from us but were not doing so in an exclusive way frankly were doing it to blaze the trail. where do you get two generate proof points to the ODM and OEM community, um...

to build demand signals that will allow them to actually supply differentiated families of compatible devices. And I've worked with the global ODM community in the past at scale with past companies. something i didn't say about Intel With my design house OEM product company called ADI Engineering, is that we did over fifty contracted projects to Intel's Edge networking network processing edge group where we developed reference designs for new Intel SOCs between one and three years before product launch.

And these designs all were designed in intended to enable the ODM community openly. so My DNA for products is open through and through. So anyhow, Fedron base it's meant to blaze a trail. It's meant To engage the ODM community And you can buy from us.

The second element Is the Fedron OS? Open source operating system. by the way, I think the word OS or the phrase os is highly overused. So again.

I was a little resistant to use it myself But I truly think it fits and that's the best descriptor. so we're calling at that Acknowledging that it's a bit over used but we think actually fit. this is resident on devices At The Edge are current Version of it, its based on Ubuntu. You know I could go into more technical details if you're interested...

I won't right now but It's the Edge First open source OS that really embodies all of the partition tolerance and reconciliation and Autonomous disconnected governance. Its what? The mechanism by which All Of That Happens. And then our commercial product is called Fedorant, it's under our own brand since its a commercial products.

It's called Federent Assure which is Commercial Fleet Governance and does run on the cloud right? I mean again not anti-cloud but just that the cloud has to be recast in terms of role for far edge AI. so thats three elements of the Fedorint architecture. let me also say that on the topic of open source, it's a little premature for me to go into a lot of details here.

But we are actually working with a leading open-source community establishing a work stream that is how should I say trying to standardize in an open and collaborative way? The idea of deployment security governance reliability of edge AI in the real world and you know this is a it's not officially approved yet to be clear but looks like its heading that way. so i don't wanna say all about other than uh... this would accelerate our strategy.

And we provide a focal point for no serious and authentic open community, code development and standardization. And we're very excited about that. Let's go back to the example where in my words there was this truck had lost connectivity? The operator left a truck at some point of time is he truck autonomous truck decided it was time to start moving again.

I run into another truck or whatever. so yeah an excavator yes Right excavator. so if in the future this company would be using your solution where exactly? maybe one of these three modules that you talked about and what specifically is it.

That will make sure that this will not happen. yeah, so on the truck on the device itself with me something like the Federan base with the Federaan OS. It would have a processor that can operate independently and autonomously, but when connectivity is lost because in large-scale pit mine or wherever there's loss of connectivity isn't really a failure mode, it's just operational reality. It happens right?

So let's don't pretend like it doesn't anyway. so that would assure... That would enforce policies. you know I don't know the exact precise policy that was violated in that right i don't have access to the detailed reports.

but upon reestablishment of connection, don't automatically restart motion. Perform safety checks make sure interlocks are resolved and establish a condition there where motion isn't resumed after connectivity loss until certain criteria are met. or better yet another policy would be You know when connectivity is lost, you know here. Is a safe mode?

Here are certain actions that are authorized. only do these it as possible That you could just simply shut down and wait. the problem is for A lot of autonomous systems maybe from mine truck shutting Down in waiting actually would be The best policy. but For other applications Connectivity loss shutting down And waiting for reconnection isn't?

I mentioned a chemical reactor or a uav, right? A mine ventilation system. You know shutting that down if connectivity and authority is lost isn't...isn't uh-a safe action?

so um..so thats what would happen. the Fedron base running the Federon OS Would have set of predefined policies that establish the surface area of what is acceptable and safe operation. And restarting motion of the mine truck without resolving every safety condition, operational conditions interlock would be specifically prohibited.

Very good. so let's we need to come too close here. if not we could talk for hours. I don't wanna almost like assuming you have maybe an X call as well here.

So Assuming That we will be that you're gonna have customers using your solution as without the exception of your product. It's it's going to be open source other companies working on a similar on the same or similar solutions so that we start recognizing their problem and we started providing solutions. what is that going to do? to the total market in which we are operating off cloud solutions of data centers, off edge.

How do you see that developing? Which could not have developed that way without solutions like yours putting into the market?" Yeah I think if you didn't have a solution. And right now the status quo is that.

I don't want to miss quote statistics, but you know it's a surprisingly high percentage of pilot deployments. Of edge AI really never make out of the lab. i think its an excess of ninety percent. so yeah And the issue is that, you know things work in a lab.

they work on a pilot. You put one or two test systems out. by the way we have our first test system's out too. but were not pretending like there are complete answer to everything right?

They're just start of discovering how this works with real world. But anyhow...you put few test systems and then your getting positive results. Then try scale And I think, was at the Edge AI Foundation Summit in San Diego a few months ago.

There is representative from Zedita or another company there that great company right and his comment was that you know inference of the edges like five percent of them challenge. The ninety-five percent as the operational ugliness actually running things with the far edge. And so I think that's what you'll see. And again, Deloitte has talked about this there was a recent report from the Edge AI Foundation and Wevolver About State of The Edge.

they actually spent quite a bit of time talking about D-Dill environments on how they impact edge AI. by the way ddills an acronym which is i believe it's denied disrupted intermittent and limited environments. It's more used to refer Defense type scenarios, but you know I think the industry is finding out that all it takes for a farm or a mine Or a disaster zone to become a detail environment Is connectivity drop? A tree.

That's blocking your starlink signal a backhoe that cuts fiber right. You know as you build critical dependencies on the cloud All of these things become detailed environments. so anyhow thats. uh i guess Thats what we're seeing.

Very good. Steve, tell us about your team. where you based are looking for talent? Yeah and if so what should they bring?

So we're in the US. The company is based In Virginia Although We have a distributed Team A U S Team of Senior Developers And Architects Obviously Executives Marketing Sales some international component to that as well. We're working with market leading best of breed companies India in actually Ukraine, there's I think no one on the planet who has outside of SpaceX. I should qualify but i think There is No One On The Planet Who Has Better Knowledge Of how Starlink Actually Works and How The Terminals Are Actually Built Than Then Some Really Smart People.

In Ukraine We're Always Looking For people That are Well-Verced And Real edge systems in industrial systems, development. We don't have formal job openings posted at the moment but these people are quite rare. they're hard to find and so we tend to be opportunistic I hate to say create positions. it's close.

Nevertheless, if one of our listeners feels that they are maybe on off the person's you're referring to. Stephen thank you very much for opening my eyes from beginning as I saw what your company is working towards it. As I said, i'm probably the first person who has not been completely aware of the potential. You know losing governance when moving to the edge and thank you very much for bringing that to our attention and sharing with us The solution that uh...

that you are working on in providing to market. Yeah, thanks again Peter for having me on. I've really enjoyed the discussion. i hope your listeners get something out of it and again please you know if anyone's interested in joining The Movement And I do view this not as a product almost Not As A Company.

It's more Of A Movement That We're Starting that we just happen to have a company based around, but you know if your listeners are interested please feel free to get in touch with me and we can have an interesting technical discussion. And I will make sure that we keep each other up-to-date. maybe be going to the opportunity talk about our common time at Intel number one and about camping. Camping, sprinters!

Steven thank you for a great day. Thanks Peter take care.