Josh Teigen is the Commissioner for North Dakota’s Department of Commerce. At this briefing organised by the Foreign Press Center, he speaks about his state’s role as the “Silicon Valley of Drone Innovation.” He gives an update on the uncrewed aerial systems industry, and the state’s ambitious talent attraction and workforce initiatives to support this growing sector of the economy. Excerpts:
North Dakota
It’s great to be here and talk a little bit about what we have going on in North Dakota, especially when it comes to drone innovation. For those of you that may not know a lot about North Dakota, we’re a small state, heavily focused on energy and agriculture, which makes up about 70 percent of our economy. So as a state that is made up primarily of commodity markets, that leaves us highly susceptible to commodity price swings in the market.
So with that, about 10 years ago the legislature and members of our executive branch decided that North Dakota was going to be the frontier for all unmanned systems innovation in the United States. And so with that, we’ve invested over $100 million, now approaching $150 million, in developing a unmanned aerial systems network. And so what that means is in the U.S. there are seven federally designated test sites for the commercialization of UAS technology. North Dakota is home to one of those – actually the largest of those test sites. In addition to that, the first kind of frontier of UAS technology is flying beyond visual line of sight. There’s a lot of people that are doing line-of-sight UAS development, but the first to be able to fly beyond visual line of sight with full FAA exemption is North Dakota. And a lot of the reasoning for that is because of the network that we’ve been able to build.
So essentially conventional aviation networks don’t work for unmanned systems. So what North Dakota did, is we’re essentially going to build the – our very own network for drones to operate within. So this network will communicate with FAA air traffic control systems, as well as with ground operation systems, and integrate seamlessly so we can conduct the first beyond-visual-line-of-sight mission.
So that system is in place today. We also have the first UAS-specific focused business park in the entire nation. So all of the ground operations that need to go into air autonomy are something that a lot of people forget. So we have the air autonomy network, we also have the ground autonomy infrastructure to enable that, and then we’re one of the federally designated test sites.
Using technology to battle flooding
So a recent example of how we’ve used this technology would be in recent flooding. So in the spring, a lot of times the eastern part of our state experiences major flooding. And we were able for the first time to use your beyond-visual-line-of-sight network to actually conduct drone missions to fly, observe funding – or flooding, figure out where certain problem areas would be, coordinate rescue and infrastructure needs. So there’s a public safety component and emergency services component of it, but in addition there’s huge industry benefits as well. So as a state that sits within the top three of oil and gas production for the entire United States, a lot of pipeline infrastructure, it’s incredibly costly to inspect pipelines manually with someone in a vehicle, someone in a helicopter, someone in an airplane. Far more cost-advantageous to have someone fly a drone beyond visual line of sight with hyperspectral camera imaging to inspect pipelines.
Agriculture
The same could be said for our agriculture sector, where we’re the number one producer of 14 different crop varieties. And being able to fly fields to detect different crop diseases, to detect moisture levels, or things so – we can bring autonomy to farming and agriculture, which increases profitability and productivity, but then also helps reduce costs. Because rather than spraying an entire field with fertilizer, we can target it to the specific areas that are needed. We can do that all with informed imaging – or images that we’re getting from these drones.
So those three kind of pillars of this industry work really well, where we see it not as the next industry vertical of our state, but actually a horizontal industry that touches things like energy, agriculture, transportation, and logistics. And even some of the infrastructure that we’ve invested in and the things that we’ve done, those investments can be applied to the ground level for ground autonomy.
So one of the first frontiers that we’ve explored there is actually with our department of transportation. So our department of transportation has thousands of miles of interstate and highway, and those ditches need to be mowed. Well, they can now use autonomous lawnmowers to mow those areas using the network that we designed for air autonomy. And that network as well can be applied to factory automation as well. You can move things through a production process while interacting with a network that may be tied into an entire logistics hub as well. So those are a few use cases of how we’re utilizing this.
Infrastructure
And I talked a lot about infrastructure and the investments we’ve made there. And our thesis on this is if we build the infrastructure, that means the commercialization about those technologies that need that infrastructure will also take place here. If you want to commercialize drone technology, you need to fly beyond visual line of sight. The only place you can do that is in North Dakota. So we’ve kind of backed ourself into this IP commercialization via these investments in all of the different infrastructure components that I’ve mentioned.
Business with Africa
We’ve recently started doing a lot of business with South African companies as well, so great to hear from you.
To address the first part of the question, when it comes to, I guess, how these things will be used from a national defense standpoint, I mentioned that ground autonomy aviation business park – actually two of the anchored tenets there are Northrup Grumman and General Atomics. Northrup Grumman is repurposing these Global Hawk drones that were used by the Air Force and rather than looking down and using them for surveillance purposes, they’re actually converting them to look up. And they can fly and look for ICBMs and other things to identify missiles from a national defense standpoint.
National defence
So I think as we look at national defence at a global scale, we know that troops on the ground is becoming less and less of a frontier and wars are being fought with – say it’s cyber security, say it’s drones, say it’s other things where the impact to human life is minimized, and I think that is a good thing for everyone. It’s more data-driven than human casualty-driven, and I think that’s positive for all. So we certainly see tons of national defense applications for the drone infrastructure that we’re building, which is why we have two large Air Force bases, we have this business park with major defense contractors and things that are utilizing our network for that purpose.
When it comes to kind of the global competitive landscape, I think there’s a – perhaps a global thought around not purchasing products that are maybe made in Japan or commercialized – or not Japan, China, I’m sorry – commercialized in China because of some of the intellectual property concerns. And so that’s where we see commercializing, whether it’s software, hardware, whatever it may be – doing that on U.S. soil is a huge competitive advantage for us.
Japanese angle
And actually, I was thinking of Japan because Japan’s one of our strategic partners in kind of the global national defense space. A lot of Japan’s national security comes from the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, which is home to a lot of these autonomous missions. And so if the technology is commercialized here, we can apply that across the world, and it has the – I would say maybe the strictest air requirements with our FAA and what they’ll allow us to do and not to, especially over people. So if we can solve for that here, we can apply it just about anywhere. And so that’s where I think we fit kind of in that global competitive landscape of things.
