Chris Yip 0:02 Welcome to Tell Me More: Coffee with Chris Yip, the official podcast of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering at the University of Toronto, each month, I sit down with someone from our vibrant global community to talk about what places them at the heart of designing bold solutions for a better world. You'll meet alumni, students and professors who are making a difference across a range of fields, including some where you may not expect to find them. My guests today are two of the four members of Prandtl Dynamics, a company founded by U of T Engineering undergrads. Over the past year, they've been making headlines by doing something that many established aerospace companies cannot yet do, which is to figure out how to deal and manage with drones. Michael Acquaviva is studying engineering science with the electrical and computer engineering option, while Anna Polataeva is in our Material Science Engineering Program. Hey guys, welcome. Michael Acquaviva 0:59 Thank you for having us, Dean Yip. Anna Poletaeva 1:00 Thank you. Chris Yip 1:02 Looking forward to our conversation today. Little out of sequence, I remember when you guys reached out to me and said you had a question. Anna Poletaeva 1:09 I feel like I just had, we had a few meetings with you, and I feel like along the way, being incorporated was some of the advice so we followed up with so many people. Right now, it's like hard to tell. Chris Yip 1:19 It's a blur, right? Anna Poletaeva 1:20 Yeah, it's a little bit of a blur. Chris Yip 1:20 No, I remember, what I remember the most about that meeting — and lots of our design teams do this, right? Our established design teams, you know, Blue Sky, we're going to do a solar challenge. You know, you came in, rest of your team, and we'll mention, you know, Parth Mahendru and Asad Ishaq came in and said, we have this challenge that we've read up about, and we'd like to enter it. What do we do? And I'm like, well, we'll just go. Go for it. You don't actually need my permission. You could just go and but I'm happy to help and let's see what you guys can come up with. So do you want to maybe describe a little bit with this challenge, and then we'll roll back a little bit in time. Michael Acquaviva 1:32 This was back in I believe it was 2023. There was a challenge, which was posted by the Department of Defense here in Canada, Department of National Defense, and it was a call to figure out new counter drone solutions. Not just for you know, the battlefield or heavy military aspects, but for other applications as well. Drones are a threat to critical infrastructure, they're a nuisance in areas like concerts and sporting venues, they can be used for corporate espionage and other nefarious activities within cities and right now, there's not really a good way of dealing with drones in urban environments. You know, taking them down kinetically can cause a lot of collateral damage so what the market is demanding right now are solutions which aren't, you know, hard takedown solutions, but can kind of bother and repel drones in a in a certain way. So we came up with the idea to use ultrasound to repel drones. We send a beam towards the drone, messes up with the internal electronics, and basically forces the operator to either move the drone away because he can't see his camera, or we can actually take over the telemetry of the drone and force it to move in a particular direction. So I guess at the beginning, when we first reached out to you, we were looking for some guidance. I mean, we were four engineering students, never ran a company before, didn't even have a corporation set up and here we we saw this bid and this call from a government agency, and we were looking for all the guidance we could get. Anna Poletaeva 3:25 Yeah, that was in the beginning of like summer, middle summer, end of the summer 2023, and we joined the team together. It was Parth who started this whole thing. He created a project name, he started the first application, and then he called a few of team members, including me, also Asad Ishaq and some other people who sadly left the project for their own reasons but basically, for example, how I met Parth that was through Praxis III, an engineering science course and interestingly enough, we are working on one of the projects where we had to design a box to carry medicine with the drones to Malaysia. However, I know Asad and Parth were friends way long before that in some other engineering course. And we met Michael, like six months later, seven, eight months later, through other engineering science connections, other friends that we had, and that's how we got together. Chris Yip 4:13 I wanted to sort of frame the context a little bit even more. I mean, it's very topical. It depends when you're listening to this podcast, but we're recording this maybe two or couple weeks after the major California wildfires. And one of the biggest incidents there was a drone that someone was flying where they weren't supposed to be flying during, the during the fire, and it damaged one of the Canadian super soaker planes, basically right, super scoopers, the FAA had set up a no-drone fly zone around the wildfires, and yet somebody still decided they needed to do this and take a drone up, and then realized that by doing that, having the damage caused to the plane actually grounded the fleet. So I think the context here of what you're trying to do was really about how do you make sure drones are not operating in areas where they are not supposed to be? I don't want a drone flying around my condo building. Anna Poletaeva 5:09 Actually, we had a few people reach out to us, either from Canada or US, who are saying that we have a house, we have a pool, we have kids running around like we don't want drone above all those houses. Can we have anything ourselves to protect? Chris Yip 5:21 Yeah, it's an interesting problem, right? There are restrictions, but that that's like saying, don't speed, right? It, it's just something you and most of the time, people will do it anyways, and they don't get caught but I think you're talking about a situation where you actually want to impose a kind of a hard barrier, right? Michael Acquaviva 5:38 Yeah, exactly. Um, drones, they've just over the past few years, they've become so much more accessible. For, you know, a few hundred dollars you can go to Costco and pick something up and fly it anywhere, even in the restricted fly zones, as long as the drone is under 250 grams, you can take off anywhere and fly anywhere. Anna Poletaeva 5:54 Yeah, I feel like, right, nowadays, nowadays, you don't even need a license to fly, like some of them, they're fixing that too. Michael Acquaviva 5:59 Yeah. So drones have become so much more accessible, and one of the things that we focus on is also area denial, so setting up a perimeter around a no fly zone where we don't want drones and we broadcast their sound waves, and that, in effect, keeps the drones out. Chris Yip 6:15 There had to be a critical point as you were going down the design path and engineering, you do this in our Praxis course, and all these courses, we sort of outline the scope. When did you decide, okay, we have an idea here, and we're gonna go, we're gonna do this. Anna Poletaeva 6:32 I feel I can take that one. I feel like when we got the group together, we were thinking about different ideas, diversion and conversion in different designs. We were considering different solutions that we could potentially do, and we had a few restrictions ourselves, just because we are limited on budget and the materials we could use. Labs, testing space, we understand that there's a lot of like, hard kill solutions out there, or maybe something that requires, like, a huge power source that we do not have so we were thinking in some of the designs that we came up with was maybe using microwaves or like magnetic field, but that would be very, very expensive and hard. Other examples that we found were nets, because there exists technologies using nets. However, that technology did not seem innovative enough, and it would be quite repetitive, and we feel like we would not make a difference in a competition, considering all these different companies like Boeing telenine, who have massive solutions with million dollar cameras. We realized that we have to make ourselves visible and different enough so that they select us from the application process and one of the ideas that came up was to use ultrasound for the drones. And the thought process behind was that, let's look at what are the weakest part of the drones, and how can we interrupt that or disable that so, like ultrasound would penetrate and start maybe breaking parts inside, or making some components oscillate in a different way, or a clog not give the right signal. And that seemed the most interesting idea for everybody, and I feel we started going with that. We started designing for that, even though it was a little bit hard because we need to buy a few speakers, connect a few breadboards, create a circuit. And while testing we actually, for example, realized that we had some magnets in our components that were creating electro magnetic effect with everything that we had, and that was not the desired thing that we wanted. So we had to isolate components in certain parts that we bought just to make sure that this is ultrasound that we're making, and that's the only one that's generating effects on the drones. And we build up a component, like we build the first prototype. It was made actually out of components from Canadian Tire, Home Depot, we just bought a few fans, fruit bowls, we put it together, we disassembled things, we put a few tweeters in there. It was honestly like sometimes working and not working, and we had to try a lot to make the drone react to it in a certain way, because we didn't know everything about that back in the day. So when we actually sent our first application to D & D, we had a prototype that was half stable, we made a few pictures, recordings, we had a few data readings that we had from the gyroscope, for example, which is one of the components that gets affected and that was sent in September, October, and that's the first time they reacted to our application, and they say that they like the idea. So far, there's nobody who presented this idea. Are we willing to go forward with it? And if so, we would have to present more information to them and a more developed design that will prove TR level five. So that means that there's different TR levels in the technology, and ours was like a technology that was proven almost in concept, and we were trying to recuperate it in real world and test it with actual results. So then we continued working on this until in January, we had a different iteration of the design, which was a bit lighter, more portable, required less power, and we submitted that with some more data, and they like the results, and that's how we got admitted to the sandbox in 2024 Chris Yip 9:47 I think what you described is very much it is a design process only because you're students, and you're not a Boeing or a Teledyne with nine figure budgets and massive teams. You're four or five undergrads from different disciplines that really, necessarily forces you down the kind of the low cost, creative ideation, almost hackaway type approach to doing it. I mean, first off, how did it feel to get selected to the next step? Because that's actually I didn't realize it was that. I thought it was just like everybody goes in and you go, but you... Anna Poletaeva 10:18 Yeah, we have to prove ourselves first before Chris Yip 10:20 Yeah, so how did, how did that feel to when you got the email back or the phone call? Anna Poletaeva 10:24 I feel like we thought that was a little bit of a scam, maybe, like, we checked it came from the right directory that, like, they really like, were referring to Prandtl Dynamics. And once, like, we like, send a response back, they responded again. They're like, oh, so they're following up with us like, this is not just, like an empty email. I think, with this at first, say that we are part of, like University of Toronto, that we are students. However, to be part of the competition, you need to be some kind of entity and we didn't have an entity back in the day yet. So yes, we incorporated ourselves in December 18, I believe of 2023 that's what it was. Michael Acquaviva 10:55 Yeah, yeah. Well, we were, just give a little bit of background. We were the first ever student team to be accepted into this competition. So it's a, it runs every two years, this competition, and we were the first ever student team so that, in itself, was a great feeling when we got the email back, and just getting accepted was it was even monumental for us, and then, not to mention even winning the competition but yeah. Chris Yip 11:17 So describe the competition before we get to the how well you well, kind of gave away how well you did but describe the competition itself. Michael Acquaviva 11:24 It was set up as a red team versus blue team kind of thing. So the organizers would fly some drones, and then we would demo our technology and see how we could affect them. So we drove all the way from Toronto to Alberta, 30 hour drive with our prototype in the back. It was about half a meter by half a meter the original prototype, and it was able to do about 50 meters of range. So we were able to affect drones 50 meters out. So yeah, we drove all the way out there because, you know, we couldn't afford the shipping cost to ship this massive thing all the way to Alberta. Drove out there. And then, you know, when we got there, we saw that we were up against some serious competition. We had companies over there, established companies like Boeing, Teledyne, who spent, you know, 20, 30 million dollars developing their prototype and we kind of, I wouldn't say, We hacked something together, we went through a design process, but we were pretty limited in terms of our budget. So we were out there with about a four figure prototype, uh, we spent about, I want to say, $15,000 putting everything together. Anna Poletaeva 12:21 Not considering all the testing and the [unintelligible] that we birthed throughout, but a little bit more. Yeah, yeah. So we drove out there with definitely the most... MacGyvered Brute force technology made out there, with some hammering and wood andmetal. Michael Acquaviva 12:27 Exactly. But we put something together and it worked, and we impressed everybody over there. We were able to, you know, ultrasound is not a traditional method used to affect drones, and we're able to prove that we can have some pretty serious effects. Disabling the cameras was one of them, causing the drones to go unstable and essentially taking them over and forcing them to go in a certain direction, (Chris: right.) stuff that's unheard of using ultrasound technology. Chris Yip 13:00 Okay, so you went through the competition, tell the audience now, how did you do? Michael Acquaviva 13:05 There were, I believe, 15 companies competing, of which we were the only student team, and we placed second overall. Chris Yip 13:12 And you did beat Boeing, you did beat Teledyne, massive companies which, as I understand, had entered the competition in previous years. Is that right? Anna Poletaeva 13:20 Yes, there's like, competitions every two years, but the terms and for example, prizes are different. Sometimes, like in the past years, they have signed contracts instead, for like, continue, continuous financing and work. This year was just prizes and diluted funding. Chris Yip 13:34 So what was the reaction from the judges and the other competitors. Michael Acquaviva 13:40 When we got there, one of the first things I remember being told by one of the contest organizers was you guys are the stars of the show. Everybody is here to see your technology. Nobody has ever heard of anything like this before, and we're all excited to see what your technology can do so at least when we arrived there, I felt like all the pressure was on us to blow these guys away. And it was, it was really incredible to see how much faith seasoned veterans in the field had in our technology and in our team, despite the fact that we were going up against these massive, established corporations. Anna Poletaeva 14:12 I would say another good thing about it is that they were very accommodating and flexible with us, just because we had everybody had to have a testing plan, and we had one. But however, when we arrived to the open field, our device did behave a little bit differently because we never tested it in that scenario so they were able to adjust a little bit the test with us, bring different drones from the ones that we requested before, or sometimes like flying parallels, even different drones a distance away, just to see the different effects on the GPS and the systems that they have internally. And they were just like, also observing different effects with us. We are all commenting them. And for example, we were so focused a year ago on the disruptive effect of the movement of the drone that we never noticed the camera effect. Not until we only reached the sandbox and somebody there shouted out, oh, the camera is blind, we cannot see anything and everybody just turns around and like, oh, my god, the camera is not working. And that was, like, personally, an insane moment for me to, like, discover that. Was that actually even a longer range effect than what you would initially thought you were gonna get? Michael Acquaviva 15:08 It was a little bit of a longer range effect as well and it opened us up to affecting a whole other class of drones as well. First person viewer drones, FPV drones, rely basically on their operator being able to see the full field of view using VR goggles, and just figuring out that we can disable their entire navigation system was, you know, it was a huge bonus for us, and we did test against some FPV drones at the competition as well. Chris Yip 15:34 So okay, so let's talk about the tech. For the audience, sort of you think ultrasound, people tend to think ultrasound imaging, and that's obviously very localized. If you're an engineer, you may be thinking ultrasound non-destructive testing and looking at materials by using my sound propagation through materials looking for internal cracks. How does this work in your context? Michael Acquaviva 15:55 Drones, they have devices which are micro, mechanical, electrical devices, MEMS devices, and you can think of these as having mini pendulums inside so whether it's a gyroscope or an or an accelerometer, these have a an inherent vibration and when we hit them with ultrasound, we're basically causing them to vibrate in ways that they're not supposed to vibrate in. So we mess up the sensor output. So if it's a gyroscope, which is supposed to give you data on how the drone is stable in the sky, now we've disrupted that feedback path, and the drone can no longer correct for instability. If we mess up the accelerometers, for example, in the vertical direction the drone now no longer knows what altitude it's at, so in some cases, We can force the drone to land. Even the cameras, cameras have shutters and apertures in them which move inherently so the ultrasound is able to create resonant effects in those devices as well and cause the shutter to close at rates that it's not supposed to so you get a meaningless feed out on the screen. Chris Yip 16:56 So that's the idea, to disrupt them so how I mean, well, unless you give away a trade secret, how did you build the device like? What was it? What did it look like? Michael Acquaviva 17:04 Iteration one was basically a bunch of ultrasonic transducers slapped together on a proto board and wired up to a car amplifier which had enough bandwidth to go into the lower ultrasonic range. Ultrasonic transducers, you can pretty much buy them at any hobby store. They're used typically for distance measurements, but we repurpose them. We put, we crank them up to voltages that they should have never been cranked up to, and made them produce sound at pretty, at a pretty loud pressure level. So we did that. That was iteration one. Chris Yip 17:35 This is the ultrasound. I was gonna say, if you're in the in the normal human hearing range, you would have not had a lot of happy neighbors. Michael Acquaviva 17:42 It would have been pretty annoying. Anna Poletaeva 17:44 We tried that, um, however, it doesn't have the same effects and I feel like that's the point of ultrasound too, because you don't hear anything. So it has, like, very little. Chris Yip 17:51 Humans don't hear anything. Anna Poletaeva 17:52 Oh yeah. Michael Acquaviva 17:54 Yeah, my cat's not too happy when I run this device. Chris Yip 17:56 I was gonna say, yeah, yeah. Michael Acquaviva 17:58 So that was iteration one. We basically used cheap, off the shelf components, and then as we iterated, we discovered that there's better ultrasonic transducers out there. We discovered that there's certain frequencies that we can target the MEMS devices at that they resonate at better. So we did a lot of testing and trying out different products that are on the market, seeing which ones give us the best resonance effects and the loudest pressure levels. That was one challenge, and then amplification was another challenge as well, moving away from those off the shelf car amplifiers and designing something which is more custom and... Chris Yip 18:19 Purpose built. Michael Acquaviva 18:32 Purpose Built Exactly, yeah. Chris Yip 18:34 There are no cats now in here, maybe there's an interesting way to sort of repel raccoons, maybe away from our yards. I mean... Anna Poletaeva 18:39 We have been asked that question quite a few times. People have asked us about mooses, about raccoons, about rats, birds in airports. So yeah, that is still there to test for us. Michael Acquaviva 18:51 I mean, that's how rodent control is kind of done right now. It's one method. They sell these little devices that you can plug into the wall, and it keeps the mice away, keeps the pests away. Chris Yip 19:00 That's actually, you raise an interesting one because beyond this, I mean, what other what other applications are there is this sort of idea of repelling other things, right? Michael Acquaviva 19:09 Yeah, another technology that we've been actively looking at, and it's still a pretty active area of research, is point-to-point communications that doesn't use electromagnetic waves. So, okay, yeah, it's a whole new application. We thought about it a couple of weeks ago. I was having a brainstorming session with Parth, and we were talking to some stakeholders that we know in the field, and... Chris Yip 19:28 Don't say too much about it, right? Michael Acquaviva 19:29 Yeah, definitely not gonna give away too much about it, but yeah, point-to-point communications. Essentially, think about an optical link using a laser, you know, kind of concentrating the sound beam in a directed way to send messages. Chris Yip 19:43 Yeah so, so in your case, just in that application, you know, I'm thinking focus, I'm thinking that kind of stuff, like, how, how wide a beam are you talking about? Michael Acquaviva 19:53 Yeah, so it's actually somewhat controllable. So in the first iteration of our prototype, we didn't have that control in place. But as we iderated and work towards that sandbox prototype and more modern prototypes that we have, we've been able to control the beam angle. So we started off with one which is about 120 degrees. So for short range, that's pretty good, because you can cover a pretty significant area. Chris Yip 20:14 That's wide area, that's a wide shot, yeah. Michael Acquaviva 20:15 You can cover a pretty significant solid angle but the trade off is you don't get as much range. What we found is, if you narrow it down to about 30 degrees, you can get pretty decent range while still covering a decent solid angle in the sky. Chris Yip 20:28 So in an application space, you could either you could have a narrow focus beam, but then you could mechanically sweep it. Michael Acquaviva 20:35 Exactly and yeah, one of the advantages of that is, let's say there's drones that you don't want to affect in the airspace, you can shape your beam so that it doesn't affect those drones and it only affects the ones that are are being targeted. Chris Yip 20:46 So, so you did, it was Parth who mentioned this, when we all got together and you sort of celebrated the success. You talked a little bit about what you had to do the night before the competition. Can maybe you want to relate that story a little bit to the audience? You guys look at each other... Anna Poletaeva 21:01 No, I just feel like there was a lot of different moments in there, for example, like sometimes even throughout our when we were traveling to Alberta in the car, we did a few fixes in our prototype just to make sure that it works perfectly right before the competition too. And even in the hotel room, we like, checked our system for a few other fixes. Michael, what would you like to say? Michael Acquaviva 21:22 We were still very much... Chris Yip 21:23 like in the car soldering. Is that you're gonna say? Michael Acquaviva 21:26 Not in the car soldering, but, but yeah, no, we were definitely building this thing on the way there. Had our laptops out coding in the car, and it was, it was a great journey, it was a great trip, but we were definitely hard at work the whole time. Chris Yip 21:39 Wow, I just have this visual now of that and just thinking like, you know, what an experience to have as students, right? Going forth on this right? Okay, so now, so you created Prandtl Dynamics. I don't know if you want to tell anybody why you use word Prandtl for the audience who may not be engineering like... Michael Acquaviva 21:57 Yeah, so Ludwig Prandtl. He was a German scientist, and he was one of the pioneers of fluid dynamics. He's a scientist that we learn a lot about, especially in our thermodynamics courses. Yeah, thermodynamics and aerospace courses, we learn a lot about him and... Chris Yip 22:15 He has a dimensionless number named after himself. Michael Acquaviva 22:17 He does that's correct and a lot of the theory and principles that go into what we're developing were developed by Prandtl himself. So kind of the same way Tesla is named after Nikola Tesla Chris Yip 22:30 Right right. Michael Acquaviva 22:30 We've gone along with that trend. Chris Yip 22:31 Yeah, no, I think it's great. I really loved the idea that when you said, our name is Prandtl Dynamics, I'm like, that's perfect. It's just a nice name. It worked out so well. So you created it partly because you had to enter with a name of a company, right, of an entity, but you've gone beyond that now, right? You came back from the competition. What's happened since then? Where are you guys now? Is, has there been support from the broader entrepreneurship community within U of T? is I mean... Anna Poletaeva 22:33 I feel like a lot of people reached out to us, both from U of T and outside U of T, we had certain companies, a few CEOs and CFOs of other companies and maybe investment funds, our venture capitalists, even, even some accelerators and incubators have reached out to us that if we would like to participate. Chris Yip 23:19 Independent of you, actually going to them? Anna Poletaeva 23:21 Yes Chris Yip 23:21 So they came to you. Anna Poletaeva 23:24 Part of that was not only because of the sandbox news themselves, but just because it happened to be so that we were interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and we were featured in one of their articles. So that's how I think we got some of the traction. Michael Acquaviva 23:37 So ever since we've improved the prototype, and we've also been working on the business aspect as well, so putting together proper pitch materials and trying to attract some, you know, more funding from the venture capitalists and stuff. We actually just came back from San Francisco last week, we were presenting to a big VC firm down there and meeting up with an accelerator program that we're a part of now so we've definitely been involved in the broader business community in Canada and the United States and, yeah, we're hoping to continue building this as a business. Chris Yip 24:06 That's amazing. And this is all...the competition was in June, right? Like, this is all in the last six months. Anna Poletaeva 24:12 Last days of May, first days of June. Chris Yip 24:14 Yeah. So this is, this is really only this is being less well, we're recording this in February, so we're gonna, we'll call it less than six months like, that's like a rocket ship taking off in terms of this impact. I know I've reached out to a number of our alums, and you've interacted with a few of them to sort of get advice as you went down this sort of entrepreneurship journey. I mean, can you talk a little bit about how that, how you've engaged with any of our alums? Michael Acquaviva 24:39 Yeah, definitely. Well, U of T has a very large network of founders. A lot of graduates from U of T Engineering go off to start their own companies and grow their own enterprises so being involved in that network and having those connections has really helped us gain some advice on how we can grow our business and, yeah, even small things from, how do you value, how do you value your company? How do you put together a proper patent? All of that has been advice that we've partially gotten from the broader U of T founder network, and it's definitely been useful and a resource for us. Anna Poletaeva 25:15 I would say that, in general, obviously legal advice only legal authorities can give us but in terms of U of T and some other alumni, a lot of them commented to us that we basically have to get ourselves organized, because back in the day, we didn't have a pitch, we didn't have a proper product, and they're like, if you don't have a product, what are you going to go to the investor with? Like, an idea or just a technology or concept is not enough. That's like, was one of the topics that we discussed. Another topic was that, what do you actually want to do with your company? Do you want to, just like, grow it? Or you, are you willing to give it away so somebody acquires it? Or what are you trying to do with it? Like, you have to decide, decide within ourselves, like, what is the path for us. Michael Acquaviva 25:52 In the next three to six months, probably shortly after I graduate, we're, we're hoping on going to market with the product, having something that we can at least sell. So in the past year, we've gone from essentially just an idea to having something which is marketable. Chris Yip 26:06 Right. So yes, looking forward to having you convocate across the stage and shaking your hand in June. So does this mean you're like, you're gonna, you're gonna move into Prandtl and actually make that the next step. Is that right? Michael Acquaviva 26:19 That's the plan. Yeah, just after school, definitely full time. I'm already putting in full time hours into the business. Chris Yip 26:25 Shhh you should still go to class. Michael Acquaviva 26:27 I still do, I do. But yeah, no, that's the plan. Just make that my full time, full time job basically. Chris Yip 26:34 Have you scaled your team? Because it's just initially, it was just the four of you. Michael Acquaviva 26:38 Yeah, we did bring on one additional member who's also a student here at U of T. He's been a great addition to the team, and he's really helped us push this accelerated timeline that we have. Chris Yip 26:47 Okay, that's amazing. Anna, you're, I think you're third year, right? Anna Poletaeva 26:51 Yes. Chris Yip 26:51 I have an idea what you might want to do, but I don't know if you want to tell us what you're going to do. Anna Poletaeva 26:55 No, I feel like that's the plan too. Like I have one year to go still, so I feel like I'll be just combining, so far, what I have with Prandtl, and after that, I will continue full time, completely just for Prandtl. Chris Yip 27:09 I was also intrigued like, I think it's, you know, this was the first part, right? And Prandtl does, has lots of potential with leveraging the Prandtl Dynamics name. What else is coming down the pipe? What other ideas beyond the one you told us about but you can't tell us anymore about? Anna Poletaeva 27:22 I would just would just say, like, obviously, since this is more of a disruptive or control system, we're still missing the detect portion. Sure, we can orient the beam and we can kind of look around, like, sure, the cheapest thing is just you look yourself and you direct it otherwise you we would have to. We're working on camera system with an AI detection maybe, like, with an additional laser. That's what we're looking into. Chris Yip 27:43 Wow. What a great, what a great story. I love it. An amazing testament to your your creativity, your, I guess, your resilience and being able to make, surviving a 30 hour drive, I think, first off, full props on doing that and driving all the Alberta, but being able to do this right to beat out the big corporations. So congratulations, guys. Anna Poletaeva 28:05 Thank you. Michael Acquaviva 28:06 Thank you. Chris Yip 28:06 Yeah, it was great having you today. Michael Acquaviva 28:08 Thank you so much. It was great to be on. Chris Yip 28:13 Thanks again for listening to Tell Me More: Coffee with Chris Yip. If you want to catch up on past episodes and to make sure you don't miss the next one, please subscribe. We're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and more. Just look for Coffee with Chris Yip. You can also check out @uoftengineering on Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn for more stories about how our community is building a better world. And finally, if you'd be inspired to join us, we'd love to welcome you. 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