In Fall 2019, our team partnered with Aero Systems West (ASW) to increase the safety and security of commercial drone operations utilizing the cutting-edge ICON blockchain. Both of our parties see the potential to improve commercial drone operations through the immutability and provenance of drone data stored on a blockchain (at the discretion and with approval from the owner of the data). The potential of using the ICON Network to provide Digital Identification (DID) for drones may line up very nicely with future rules that could be added to require “Remote ID” by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), discussed later in this article.

Our teams opened initial discussions and began technical exploratory work to nail down key concepts. We initially began discussions to explore the safety, reliability, and tracking improvements for drone operations by using blockchain technology. The opportunities are many, as expected, however, connecting a fast-flying drone to the ICON blockchain with block speeds of 2 seconds is no easy task. Further, we desire a ‘plug-in’ capability that is not specific to ASW drones, but can adapt to almost any drone with little modifications. These requirements demand an open software architecture that can maintain resilient communications amidst wireless data loss.

We next discuss the initial architecture model and lessons learned from flight testing.