What It Is
Overwatch Orchestrate is a bolt-on fleet relay layer for Overwatch Core. Core handles the individual mission — autonomous grid search on a single drone, from takeoff through detection to landing. Orchestrate handles everything above that: scheduling, relay, handoff, and continuous patrol across a fleet of 2 to 10 drones.
Orchestrate is not a standalone product. Each drone in the fleet runs a Core mission. The flight supervisor, the navigation stack, the onboard detection pipeline — all of that is Core. Orchestrate coordinates the fleet on top. It decides which drone flies when, where the handoff happens, and what the operator needs to know. Core is the execution engine. Orchestrate is the scheduler.
The Relay Problem
A single Parrot ANAFI UKR gets roughly 25 minutes of flight time. That is enough for one search grid or one leg of a patrol route. It is not enough for a SAR operation that lasts hours, or a coastal surveillance mission that never stops.
The naive approach — launch a second drone when the first lands — creates coverage gaps. The active drone reaches low battery, returns home, lands. An operator swaps the battery, runs a pre-flight check, relaunches. The time from first drone landing to second drone on station is 5 to 10 minutes. That is 5 to 10 minutes of zero coverage. For a SAR mission, that gap could mean a missed detection. For a security patrol, it is a window of vulnerability.
Orchestrate eliminates that gap.
How Handoff Works
The active drone monitors its battery state of charge continuously during flight. When SOC hits the swap threshold — default 20%, configurable between 15% and 30% — Orchestrate dispatches the standby drone.
The standby drone does not wait on the ground until the active drone lands. It pre-launches and transits to the handoff waypoint — the exact position along the patrol route where the active drone will break off. By the time the active drone turns for home, the standby is already on station, already flying the route. The coverage gap is measured in seconds, not minutes.
The returning drone lands, receives a fresh battery, and enters the standby queue. It becomes the next standby, ready for the next handoff. The rotation is continuous.
Waypoint Resume
This is a critical detail that separates Orchestrate from a manual drone relay. The new drone does not restart the patrol from the beginning. It picks up at the exact waypoint where the previous drone handed off.
Patrol progression is monotonic — always forward, never backwards. For a 10 km coastline patrol, this means the system makes continuous progress along the route regardless of how many battery swaps occur. Each drone contributes its 25 minutes of flight time to the collective coverage. Four drones, eight battery swaps, and the entire coastline has been swept twice — without a single metre repeated unnecessarily and without a single metre skipped.
Patrol Route Types
Orchestrate supports two patrol modes, both defined in the same map-based planner used for Core's search area.
Linear coastline patrols. Define a start point and an end point along a coastline, border, river, or pipeline corridor. The drone flies the route from start to end, reaches the terminus, reverses direction, and repeats. This is the natural pattern for long, narrow coverage areas where the threat axis is perpendicular to the route — coastal incursion, border crossing, pipeline sabotage.
Polygon perimeter routes. Define a closed polygon around a port, facility, military base, or camp. The drone flies the perimeter in a continuous loop, circling the asset indefinitely. Each lap provides a complete visual sweep of the boundary. Detection events — a person approaching the fence line, a vehicle on an access road — are flagged automatically by Core's onboard model.
Exception-Only Alerting
Orchestrate does not present a telemetry dashboard. No live video feeds. No position maps updating every second. No altitude readouts or battery graphs. The entire point of autonomy is that the operator does not need to monitor normal operations.
Instead, Orchestrate defines 7 alert types, each representing a condition that requires operator attention:
Critical battery. A drone's SOC has dropped below the level required to reach home. This should never happen under normal handoff logic — if it does, something unexpected occurred (headwind, GPS wander, extended hover).
Communications loss. The data link to a drone has dropped beyond the configurable timeout. The drone continues its mission autonomously — it has the full flight plan onboard — but the operator needs to know.
Handoff failure. The standby drone did not launch when dispatched. Battery not seated, pre-flight check failed, motor error. The active drone is still flying, but the rotation has stalled.
Detection event. The onboard model on any drone in the fleet has detected a human, vessel, or vehicle above the confidence threshold. This is the alert the operator is waiting for.
Weather exceedance. Wind speed has exceeded the 8 m/s operational threshold. The ANAFI UKR can handle stronger gusts, but sustained wind above this level degrades coverage quality and battery endurance.
Fleet exhaustion. No standby drones are available. The active drone is flying, but when it reaches swap threshold, there is nothing to hand off to. The operator needs to get batteries charged or drones back into rotation.
Geofence breach. A drone has exited the defined operational boundary. This is a safety catch — under normal operation, the flight plan keeps the drone within bounds.
Everything else is handled autonomously. The operator's role is to respond to exceptions, not to supervise normal flight.
The Fleet
The reference configuration for 24/7 coastal patrol: 3 Parrot ANAFI UKR drones and 8 batteries. One drone active, one standby (charged, pre-flighted, ready for immediate dispatch), one in maintenance rotation (battery swap, visual inspection, lens cleaning). Eight batteries sustain the rotation without waiting for charges — while two are in use (active and standby), four are charging, and two are charged and queued.
Total fleet cost: approximately EUR 50,000. Three drones at roughly EUR 12,000 each, eight batteries, charging infrastructure, and spares. Compare that to the operating cost of a patrol boat with crew — fuel, maintenance, salaries, and the fact that the boat cannot be everywhere at once either. Compare it to helicopter hours at EUR 2,000 to 5,000 per hour. The drone fleet pays for itself in days of avoided helicopter time.
For larger areas or higher-tempo operations, the fleet scales linearly. Five drones and 12 batteries cover longer routes with faster handoff cycles. Ten drones and 20 batteries can sustain multiple simultaneous patrol routes. Orchestrate handles up to 10 drones in a single instance. Beyond that, run multiple Orchestrate instances on separate routes.
Who It's For
Coastguard continuous coastal surveillance. Persistent coverage of smuggling corridors, migration routes, and distress-prone shipping lanes. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with a single operator monitoring exceptions.
Port and harbour security. Perimeter patrol around port facilities, container terminals, and anchorages. The polygon perimeter mode circles the asset continuously, detecting unauthorized approach by vessel or on foot.
Military base perimeter monitoring. Persistent surveillance of the fence line and approach routes. Detection events are flagged to the guard force. No fatigue, no attention lapses, no shift change gaps.
Border patrol along land or maritime boundaries. Linear route mode covers the boundary in continuous sweeps. Each pass adds to the cumulative detection record.
Critical infrastructure protection. Pipelines, solar farms, power stations, water treatment facilities. Any asset with a defined perimeter that must be monitored and where the cost of crewed patrol — vehicles, guards, fuel — is prohibitive or unreliable.
Any operation where coverage must be continuous and the cost of crewed patrol is the limiting factor. See the next post for a detailed operational scenario showing Orchestrate running a full 24-hour coastal patrol cycle. Full technical specifications are on the product page.