Volant Autonomy reposted this
Stop, collaborate and listen! 💡 The renowned organisational theorist, Peter Senge noted the 1983 study carried out by Royal Dutch/Shell which found that since 1970, one third of the companies listed on the Fortune 500 had vanished. In Senge’s opinion, the common theme was the inability to learn, or rather the organisation’s inability to develop a learning culture. At Volant, with some justification, we consider ourselves experts in the field of advanced aviation autonomy. However, that often means that we are acutely aware of how much more we need to learn. Not just from each other but often from our colleagues in other companies – sometimes even our competitors. Two weeks ago today, we attended the AdaCore and Capgemini High Integrity Software Conference #HISC2024 to do just that. After the conference, we took some time as a team to share what we had learned and reflect on how we could apply these learnings to our work. The outcome of the discussion is captured as continuous improvement actions and shared across the company. Our key takeaways included: 💡 Ideas about applying emerging AI tech to our high integrity software context 💡 Sharing our approaches to rapid certification and learning from others 💡 A timely reminder that “any possible behaviour will occur” in software as we extend our CI/CD verification pipeline with GnatFuzz 💡 The opportunities to use hardware to improve safety and security properties of software 💡 Methods for determining certification standards in a new domain As well as learning from others, we were able to share our best practices as Alex P. gave a talk about how we are approaching certification in an emerging industry. The number of questions showed the level of interest in the topic and the discussion continued throughout lunch. A couple of questions around the same topic elicited a lively debate at the panel session and a challenge to delegates - if we want innovation in our industry we must lead by example. At Volant we will answer that challenge by continuing to work with partners from across the industry to change what is possible. You might think that demonstrating crewed and uncrewed flight in integrated airspace is going to be hard to beat, but watch this space… Whilst we all had individual highlights, we could agree that getting to hear from industry experts and being granted the time to share innovations with colleagues from across the industry is a real privilege. We will benefit from the value of the day until we do it all again at #HISC2025. Looking forward to it!