00:00I now recognize myself for five minutes of questioning.
00:05Director Farrell, thank you for being here today.
00:09We have seen that recent concerns over privacy, public safety, and national security have
00:17led to restrictions on drones from certain foreign manufacturers.
00:22Given these concerns and these restrictions, how is the industry affected by requirements
00:28imposed by the National Defense Authorization Act?
00:33Thank you, Chairman Guest.
00:36So I believe that the United States industry is playing catch-up.
00:44I think that the commercial market and first responders have had access to cheaper Chinese
00:51technology in particular for quite a while.
00:56I think that we had heard testimony around the program that DIU has that has certainly
01:02led to advancements and investment in U.S. manufacturing.
01:09I think that the CHIPS Act and other efforts in order to bring the technology back here
01:16to invest in the critical components, the autopilots, the camera systems, have made
01:21a lot of headway.
01:22If you had asked me this question several years ago, I think I would have said we're
01:26pretty far away, but recent investments, recent technology is really showing vast improvements.
01:33The work that we're doing through Project Justice is meant to support DHS components
01:40in their procurement processes.
01:43You heard about the bottleneck at DIU.
01:46One way that we're trying to support industry here is to give them an alternative pathway
01:50for DHS procurement processes where we do our own vetting, we do our own cyber vulnerability
01:56assessments as well as critical component analysis.
01:59That opens the door for DHS components as they choose to request and look at different
02:04technologies to be able to give other manufacturers an opportunity to sell and to ensure that
02:12the components have a safe product at the end of the day.
02:17All that to say is the NDA requirements have truly caused some bottlenecks, but we are
02:24working rapidly to try to alleviate those and enhance the American product and as well
02:29as ensure the safe operations.
02:32Director Farrell, you mentioned Project Justice, a partnership between DHS S&T and the Rasput
02:40Flight Center there located at Mississippi State University.
02:45If one, you just give us a kind of a brief overview of Project Justice and then you mentioned
02:53just a moment ago, but maybe go into a little bit more detail the work being done to support
02:58the Department of Homeland Security.
03:00Absolutely.
03:01So Project Justice was started as the common UAS test site back in 2016.
03:06We exist now in our current iteration as Justice NextGen.
03:11It's the joint unmanned systems testing and a collaborative environment program under
03:15the Air, Land and Ports of Entry portfolio.
03:18As a part of this work, we support all of the components for their UAS testing as well
03:23as research and development needs as it relates to UAS as well as other associated technologies.
03:30So as DHS gets a gap within the UAS world, they'll reach out to us to be able to analyze
03:39that and this can take many different forms.
03:42It can be looking at the landscape of commercial available products.
03:48It can be examining what exists within our research portfolio to understand what can
03:53fit that space.
03:55It can also be custom UAS development.
03:58We've developed UAS that the market wasn't providing for HSI, an entry level drone that
04:04had some really great capabilities.
04:08It can also be items where like Air Domain Awareness.
04:13We just delivered a tool for DHS that provides Air Domain Awareness leveraging the Beyond
04:19Visual Line of Sight capabilities that remote ID are meant to provide and then also a broadcast
04:29or an ATAC system to give situational awareness and we demoed that actually at the university's
04:35campus around a football game scenario.
04:42We've also leveraged the program to support FEMA Region 4.
04:48So we actually flew the Teros in support for Helene as well as Debbie and that was a really
04:55great showcase of a 44 foot wingspan aircraft, 24 hours of endurance that can distribute
05:02live video and tiled imagery.
05:05Those are just some of the things we're doing but truly I think that the portfolio given
05:10the partnerships, given the collaborations with our Ashore Center of Excellence as well
05:18as the other industry partners really opens the gamut for what we can provide to DHS.
05:24Thank you Director Fairless.
05:25My time has now expired.
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