We build drones with unlimited range (by recharging on power lines). The grid is the world’s largest machine. Thus, we can collect data anywhere, anytime. We're selling a full-stack inspection service to power utilities by delivering reports with annotated photos of equipment that is broken or at risk. Our mission is to find faults and other maintenance concerns before they spark wildfires. Today power utilities are our customer, but tomorrow they'll be our deployment partner. At scale we are a new infrastructure layer for data on the physical world.

Role

Voltair is seeking a Founding RF and Electronics Engineer to take ownership over development of a novel, low-power communications stack for drone teleoperations and autonomy. This role will also be involved in ensuring regulatory compliance of the hardware (primarily FCC and FAA) and engage in engineering design review across the drone hardware development.

Contributions

• RF Hardware Development: Make tele-op inspections via LTE+Satellite a reality through a combination of COTS hardware and in-house design. Fully-custom hardware is an end goal.
• Engineering Design Review: Work closely with the engineering team to conduct design reviews of other drone hardware projects.
• Feasibility and Mission Planning: Conduct a robust feasibility study of LTE teleoperations for the United States and Canada, determining geographic limitations and hardware minimums for meeting operational goals. Work closely with software and power engineers to develop mission planning tools based on current autonomy and recharging progress.
• Regulatory and Standards Compliance: Ensure full compliance with FCC and FAA regulations, particularly with respect to RF emissions, EMI, and FCC Critical UAS Hardware requirements. Design and oversee hardware tests for compliance verification.

Skills

• Demonstrated experience designing RF hardware for critical applications.
• Understanding of FCC regulations and testing / compliance process.
• Familiarity with end-to-end PCB design process.
• Self-learner and driven to produce results independently.

Our drones recharge inductively from power lines by harvesting the magnetic field with a current transformer. We build custom drones with COTS parts. We collect visual and thermal data. Soon we'll fly our drones BVLOS over LTE, but today our field technicians collect data on-site. We run this data through a MV pipelines and then deliver the GIS and PDF reports to our customers.

Our Hardest Challenges

• Performant recharging on distribution lines
• Drone weather hardening & reliability
• Tele-operations & autonomy
• Mission planning with (1) range / recharge locations (stochastic!) (2) weather (3) FAA and other compliance constraints + traveling inspector problem
• Cost effective uplink & data management / MV on the edge