Velora Labs Qualifies Under DDI Stream 5
Canada has qualified Velora Labs under Stream 5 of the Defence Drone Initiative Marketplace, the innovation and experimentation stream. Our submission covered GPS-denied navigation and the simulation environment we develop it in.
Written with the assistance of AI.
Velora Labs has qualified under Stream 5 of Canada's Defence Drone Initiative Marketplace.
The Marketplace is run by the Department of National Defence together with the Defence Investment Agency. It pre-approves Canadian suppliers so that Canada can later run competitions among them for research, prototyping, testing, demonstrations and limited purchases.
Our submission covered two pieces of core IP, both software that rides on someone else's airframe. The first is GPS-denied navigation: estimating an aircraft's position and orientation from onboard cameras and inertial sensors, running on a small computer carried on the airframe, for conditions where GPS is jammed, spoofed or blocked by terrain. The second is the simulation environment where we develop and test our navigation stack, which lets denied and degraded cases be flown repeatedly before anything goes near a real aircraft.
This announcement is a strong signal that Canada is open to working with non-traditional partners like Velora Labs, and that drone autonomy and software has an important role to play.
Kevin Gordon, CEO and Co-Founder
Velora Labs is a Canadian-owned computer vision company based in Calgary, building mission critical edge AI for defence and autonomous systems.
About the DDI streams. Stream 5 is the innovation and experimentation stream. Streams 1 through 4 ask for a project reference from the past five years, work delivered to a NATO or Five Eyes partner, a federal department or a law enforcement agency. Stream 5 sets that aside. It asks whether the applicant is a Canadian company, whether the technology and its current maturity can be described and defended, and how Canada might experiment with it. Those are questions we could answer, so we left the other four alone. The arrangement is a standing one, and it reopens periodically for new applicants and for qualified suppliers adding streams.
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