Hello, my name is Tim Barela, and I am the founder and CEO of Black Knight Industries LLC(BKI).  We have been an official company for a little over a year now. Our research and development started about 2 years ago.  I have been building and improving upon commercial grade multi-rotor drones for the better part of 10 years now and computer coding and programming since the Commodore 64.  Between my team and I we have over 40 years experience in the computer and hobby to commercial grade robotics and electronics fields. BKI was incepted during a side job taking aerial photos of real estate for a local agent using a camera drone.  The original idea was to simply find better ways to increase flight time without having to sacrifice the usability of the drone. That kept us busy for a few months. Then I saw a news report about a massive search and rescue effort for a couple lost hikers in the wilderness I believe in Washington state.  The hikers bodies were found 2 weeks later. It was then I knew what I wanted to do.

I got with a few friends, the very ones that now make up my team, to flush out a plan to build a drone that could be used for multiple roles.  Although at the time centered around search and rescue.  We quickly discovered that the concept was not completely new, but was limited at that time to very limited flight times for the drones, and the difficulty of piloting a drone solely by first person view for the average person.

Our answer to this was an A.I. flight control system.  It is very similar to the control systems being researched for self driving cars in concept.  In design, not similar at all. Which brings us to current times.

We are at a point where we are ready to patent, copyright, and start trademarking a good bit of our work.  With your help we can do just that. We are also looking to develop our logo, and establish a website to get us ready for marketing sometime in the next 18 months, with possible product release within 2 years.

With your help, we will be able to take care of all the legal stuff, obtain new and better hardware for our system to inhabit, build and test additional prototypes.  Once the legal stuff is taken care of we will be able to start posting more details of how the system functions and even better, the video we’ve been dying to post of our original prototype in action!  

All of these things we will be updating as our campaign progresses!