Dr. David Redpath

Developer of drones, parent of boys, climber of steep rocks

I’m a curious mind – I’d describe myself as ambitious, driven and positive. I thrive on solving challenges in my work and lifestyle. Here I shared some learnings on topics relevant to the drone business, life and family. Forgive the self-indulgence, I doubt I’ll reach a level of notoriety for my own Wikipedia page! I hope to share insights and stories worth your time. Thanks David.

Dr. David Redpath, All Energy Conference, Glasgow

Articles

Sharing thoughts and ideas on business, drones, software and life. All words are my own evident from the grammar an odd spelling mistake [any AI images for illustration should be evident].

Mar 16, 2020

Windvue - Why I killed my best idea

Mar 16, 2020

LinkedIn thinks I need upskilled!

Mar 16, 2020

Work life balance, pleasing everyone pleases nobody?

R&D

Research

I frequently apply for grant funding for Sensoar for new drone innovations. Some major projects I have been part of:

Symbiotic Robotic System Methodology for Wind Turbine Blade Fault Detection (UKRI Edge Voucher): I developed a drone protocol and crawler robot for the internal inspection of wind turbine blades to find structural faults. The funding provided access to ORE Catapult expertise and test facilities at Blyth and Levenmouth.
DART (Detect and avoid Artificial Reality Test) (Dft D-Trig): I developed a virtual environment for safe testing of collision avoidance algorithms for drones using the AirSim environment and Unreal Engine. Working with the University of Edinburgh two native detect and avoid algorithms were implement the work in real-time. The project is available open source from this Github repo here.

Values

Family First
Work-Life Balance
Integrity
Curiosity
Determination
Accountability
Excellence
Leadership

Experience

Commercial experience

: Sensoar connects many areas of my life’s journey, my need for independent expression and control of my ideas. My skills in electronics, modelling, software. And the arena of small business, where a scattered mind can be a super power to keep the separate pillars spinning.

I’d been aware of drones for a few years without much interest. Looking for a new project after a home move with a little more space I decided to build an FPV drone. With my electronics and RC background I found wonderful. Before long I had several drones I'd take to the local drone racing club. I also had a larger drone with a GoPro for aerial photography. Drone racing was rather destructive with weeknights spent making repairs and ordering new parts. I was beginning to get more drawn to aerial photography and mapping. From here I decided to start Sky Tech Aerial and went on to open my first office in Bo’ness. In 2016 DJI had not long release the Phantom series on drones. My intention has been to build unique drones for the business for applications DJI drones could not do. In 2018 I met my business partners. This was incredibly useful resource over the coming years to collaborate. In the coming years the industry developed incredibly fast. Within 4 years we had moved from eight prop heavy lift drones to take pictures to <249g DJI mini. This changed the commercial industry and the market quickly became saturated with cheap drone operators. The majority of our first clients from film & TV, local videographers to estate agents went on to buy their own drones. The business was forced to diversify. This led me back into research and applying for grant funding for novel drone applications. In 2020 I won a place in EIE20 pitching the idea of a long range wingcopter drone to inspect offshore windfarms. I kept developing the business around the wind industry working on windfarms, gaining ISO and Achilles certification for the business and continuing to apply for funding. In 2024 the business rebranded to Sensoar with the focus on industrial asset inspection and survey using drones.
: After leaving BLOXX I was creatively at a loss. I briefly tried a business building and selling smart home entertainment systems based on Windows Media Center. I made some inroads into creating an ecommerce website to sell them but after cost of all the parts process were just too high. Smart phones were beginning to appear with the Apple iPhone and Google Android. Over the next year I mastered developing with Android releasing dozens of apps onto the Play store. I also won a contract to develop a point of interest tourism app for Glen Nevis which showed different point of interest information when navigating the glen. I expanded to Apple iOS and the App Store and started to release some tricks to scale recycling game codes and art. I expanded to a small team of artists, programmers and marketers managing an app portfolio of 300 apps and games. The nature of quantity needed to profit necessitated frequent updates to keep up with Apples changes. Profits sagged as the level of entry was so low world-wide to program, create content and release for free with ads. I was never proud of the slide to mediocre quantity over quality and race to the bottom. I began to look for new business opportunities where I could engage with local customers face to face.
: BLOXX was a web filtering company that provided access control features to schools, universities, councils and other organisations. Within the small team of 40 or so I joined with 5 other developers to move the product to the next version restricting the code base and adding new features. My initial responsibilities were writing a configuration server, clustering and high availability in C/C++/PHP/MySQL. BLOXX taught me a lot about small business and working in a small team. We were accountable to fix customers problems as soon as possible and we often managed to deploy updates the same day. It was an eye opener that creating a new product is fun, but maintaining a live product that thousands of customers users used was very stressful. I can neither confirm nor deny the brief Easyjet website outage in 2017. Extra code was added the next morning to avoid creating packet storms. As my mums health began to slide I grew increasingly unhappy in a 9-5 role. I needed to find a way to work from home in a freelance role. BLOXX has enjoyed prosperity in the decade before 4G. It was taken to exit successfully for its AI categorising websites.

Education

And the story behind it

: Doing a PhD wasn’t really my original plan. I was invited after my degree that PhD funding was available and at first I refused. A bad recruitment center experience in Blackpool for a major aerospace company, and poor prospects from the deflated economy made me reconsider. I had been attracted to research all along. Many lunch breaks during my undergrad were spent sandwich in hand reading through the many PhD posters within the Ocean Systems Group. I started my PhD (as yet untitled) broadly on feature extraction, selection for machine learning applied to underwater video classification. This was under the guidance of Dr Katia Lebart. Research was a fantastic experience. I enjoyed pulling the strings mentality reading journal after journal, following the references. I’m not so sure how good I’d have been at this using inter library loans. I was fortunate to arrive after the Google epoch and the majority or journals were available electronically only a few clicks away. All one need do is craft the right combination of keywords. Neural networks, Baysian classifiers, support vector machines, feature space, convergence algorithms. I was in heaven! My research started to focus on ensemble learning and a novel combined feature selection method. I got the chance to publish and attend conferences in the UK and California which was a great experience. My thesis was applied to marine video classification for identification of coral and seabed damage resulting from trawling activity. Programmed in C/C++/Perl with majority of prototyping done in Matlab. This was a great two years ahead of the dreaded year three write up. English was my lowest performing subject at school. I found the expression of scientific ideas challenging having to use a full stop every line and a half (and lose context). It’s unfair legal authors have exemption from this! Tears were shed by both of us as each chapter moved through monthly revisions. Eventually we converged on the final thesis for viva. This was passed without incident and very minor corrections. I did consider a post doctorate, but local options were very limited and I wasn’t in a position to leave Edinburgh with a disabled parent. That left industry. I hope I wasn’t too bad a student. Katia moved on to start a bakery business a year later. The Wee Boulangerie on Clerk Street, Edinburgh. I went on to suffer a decade or recurring nightmares I was still writing up!
: As I progressed through my degree, I became aware of how programming was extending the functionality of electronics. The purpose or design of any ‘thing’ even in the natural world is very much purpose and process driven. This led my interests to pivot into software development alongside electronics. I choose my own ambitious dissertation topic on video stabilisation to remove camera shake. With help from my supervisor Professor David Lane I was guided what image processing techniques might be used. This let me to the registration FFT technique. Initially programming with MATLAB. I was inspired to build a user interface that could run on a PC, by chance Intel had recently released the OpenCV library. Essentially this was free to use code that in C/C++ that integrated with a MS Visual C++ front end. Videos could be imported; the stabilisation algorithm ran and a few minutes later the result displayed side by side. I knew this could be done in camera as processing power became available. By 2020 I could never have dreamed this would be integrated into such as small form factor as the GoPro – incredible!
: As I progressed through my degree, I became aware of how programming was extending the functionality of electronics. The purpose or design of any ‘thing’ even in the natural world is very much purpose and process driven. This led my interests to pivot into software development alongside electronics. I choose my own ambitious dissertation topic on video stabilisation to remove camera shake. With help from my supervisor Professor David Lane I was guided what image processing techniques might be used. This let me to the registration FFT technique. Initially programming with MATLAB. I was inspired to build a user interface that could run on a PC, by chance Intel had recently released the OpenCV library. Essentially this was open source code in C/C++ that I managed to integrated with a MS Visual C++ front end. Videos could be imported; the stabilisation algorithm ran and a few minutes later the result displayed side by side. I knew this could be done in camera as processing power became available. By 2020 I could never have dreamed this would be integrated into such as small form factor as the GoPro – incredible!

Wise Words

Inspirational Words

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go.”

Dr. Seuss

“If you can dream it, you can do it. Always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse.”

Walt Disney

“Quiet people have the loudest minds”

Steven Hawking

“The success we are looking for is in the work we are avoiding”

Joseph Campbell

“We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.”

Swami Vivekananda

Personal

Questions you may be afraid to ask, may never ask or just don't care...

Family

Originally from Edinburgh I now live in East Lothian alongside family. I was married for 11 years of an 18-year relationship which brought us two boys now 8 and 12. It takes decades until we really meet ourselves. I always struggled to provide the relationship time sacrifice over my own interests. I was never a perfect partner and never going to be this person, preferring time to keep my own counsel. Our parenting journey has been difficult. My youngest was treated successfully for ALL 2020-2023. My eldest has his difficulties which we didn’t fully understand at the time. He was diagnosed with ASD in 2024. Yes, there probably is a hereditary element... These have been the hardest years of our life. I’m very grateful for the family relationship we maintain. We commit an equal share of time and energy to our boys and to look out for each other as co-parents.

I was born in Edinburgh, an only child to my mum, a teacher and my dad a joiner. My mum suffered from Kidney problems since she was a young teenager. She was forced to retire in her mid 40’s as her health deteriorated. She had two unsuccessful transplants. High blood pressure from the second led her to lose sight in one eye. Through most of my childhood and while she was still working she used a peritoneal dialysis. When this system stopped working, she moved on to haemodialysis requiring 4 hour hospital treatments 3 times a week. She was devastated to give up teaching as it was a great pride to her that she has helped so many kids to read and write. My mum was strict and pushed me to be independent. She mentioned to me it was hard not to be loving towards me but she was never sure how long she would live. I have memories of being moved between different family members during her long hospital stays. One thing my mum did a brilliant job at was birthdays! Every year as a teen I was treated to a model RC cars, a boat, aeroplanes and a helicopter from Wonderland or Marionville models.

My dad was a freelance joiner! He had once worked for a company only to be fired for stealing. He was skilled at all trades and was busy across town most days renovating properties for others cash in hand. Each night this was finished with ‘professional networking’ at one of Edinburgh’s many pubs. The lifestyle of the 1980’s man with frequent drinking and fatty foods eventually led to my dad’s death. He was one of several in our street, by no means impoverished! One of the other neighbours who looked like he would follow made and impressive pivot after the arrival of his first grandchild taking up cycling! Aged seventeen I was now man of the house. My mum kindly supported me through the rest of my education. It wasn’t a free ride. With family heirloom cupboard of tools there was always expectation for me to undertake upkeep of the house. I slowly worked my way through each of the rooms over the coming years fixing and redecorating.

Growing up I remember playing on my own a lot making up imaginative games. I remember in the back garden my mum teaching me how to spell ‘business’ for the first time and being happy with myself. I struggled in primary school not really engaging in class preferring to drift off in my imagination looking at all the cloud formations out of the tall classroom windows. I caused some mischief during that time given my company. This abruptly stopped in high school where I didn’t adjust well to new social circles and adolescence. I shut down socially choosing not to speak to any of my peers. I was horribly isolated. At the end of S1 we had a school camp which involved rock climbing. I’d see climbing in an outdoor magazine and had no interest towards it. Our introduction climbs complete a demo rope was set up on something especially difficult no one was supposed to be able to climb it. I remember making progress up on these small quartz holds and completing the climb. I was later told no one else had done it and the points let my team win. The following term, Dave Juner a maths teacher who ran after school climbing club invited me to join the school club. From there I was hooked, Dave took us climbing a nearby Traprain, Rosyth Quarry and to Glen Nevis. He also helped me academically unlocking I was in fact a self-learner. I remember ticking through the maths exercise books every day, getting my gold star and moving out of the foundation class. This extended to my other subjects. Dave had helped me find my confidence. I don’t think I was any better socially by finding climbing showed me it was OK to be different. I wasn’t a cool kid, hippie or a goth. I was a dirtbag climber! The mindset and confidence I found from climbing challenges breaking down what looked impossible over weeks to months with training and persistence overflowed into my academic efforts. I became very driven once I set sight on an objective a trait that continues to this day.

In my climbing I went on to search out and establish many new sport climbing routes across the UK. Essentially problem-solving ways up unclimbed rock faces. One of the first I established took me 15 years to climb, owed to my dad Devastation Generation was the first route in Scotland to be graded 8c. Years later I was to establish a long line on the huge Little Orme crag The Diamond. This line owed to my mum, Curious Minds 8a. Our journeys are not straight paths, as Steve Jobs quoted you can only join the dots looking back! Who we really are is written in our history.