FLYING ROBOT'S RANGE OF ASSETS

Kieran Boyd

fromAvestec Technologies

12 Apr, 2023

This flying robot attaches to various assets to perform contact based Non-Destructive Testing

Intelligent flying robots can perform Non-Destructive Testing inspections on various assets across various industries, including tanks, towers, pipes, flare stacks, ships, and more.

robotic arms

- unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)

SKYRON, an intelligent flying robot, can perform Non-Destructive Testing inspections on various assets across various industries, including tanks, towers, pipes, flare stacks, ships, and more. It has been used onshore and offshore and can operate in confined spaces.

The robot's exceptional capabilities have been demonstrated through successful contact-based inspections conducted for different companies and service providers over the past few years. As a tool with an unparalleled ability to perform NDT inspections, SKYRON has proven invaluable in various industries.

To see this flying robot in action, watch the video above showcasing its capabilities on different assets and locations.

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Could studying how animals move cohesively in a group teach us how to help drones fly safely?

Civil engineers observe how flocks of animals avoid collisions to help devise safe, self-regulated systems for drones and driverless cars.

Tom Abate

fromStanford University

06 Nov, 2018

unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)

Anyone who’s seen a flock of starlings twist and turn across the sky may have wondered: How do they maneuver in such close formation without colliding?

“Many types of animals swarm or flock or otherwise move in coordinated ways,” says Nicholas Ouellette, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. “No individual animal knows what every other animal is doing, yet somehow they move cohesively as a group.”

Understanding precisely how they do this, Ouellette says, may be a key to helping engineers design “flocks” of aerial drones and driverless cars. Emulating animal swarms is attractive because they not only operate without central control but they’re also fault-tolerant, to use an engineering term, meaning they can adapt quickly and gracefully to sudden or unexpected conditions. Swarms are also resilient in that they can operate in dirty, disturbed environments.

So Ouellette and his team have embarked on a series of studies that explore how animal swarms develop the kind of self-organized and self-regulated systems that would allow devices such as drones and mobile sensors to operate safely and efficiently, without the sort of top-down controls that typify, for example, something like the air traffic control system.

Rather than examine starlings or other birds, which would be impractical to study in the lab because of the space they need to fly, Ouellette and his crew look at non-biting midges, a type of flying insect often found near water or in the shade of trees. Unlike starlings, whose graceful formations, called murmurations, make us stare up at the sky, midges buzz around in chaotic, cloud-like masses. But, says Ouellette, midge swarms still share common features with bird flocks and other animal groups, in that the swarms stay cohesive without any outside control or leadership.

“Midges are so small, they’re easy to keep in a lab,” Ouellette says. “They swarm at dusk and dawn and are easy to cue

Image: Joggobot in action

Drones As Fitness Trainers

The intersection of drones and wearables is opening the doors to the market of fitness drones

Farbod Moghaddam

26 Apr, 2021

unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)

This article was discussed in our Next Byte podcast.

The full article will continue below.

The Market

Fitness, wearables, and recreational drones are all multi-billion dollar markets. The intersection between fitness and wearables resulted in products such as the Fitbit that not only changed how people kept up with their fitness goals, but also added features that gave users more insight about their health while making something mundane like walking exciting through gamification.

Health providers have now started using data from fitness wearables to determine insurance rates in the United States so what started as a wristband to track how much you walked in a day has greatly changed how we think about health in society. Fitness drones have the same potential.

First Attempt

Joggobot was one of the earlier attempts at making a fitness drone and it was made by the Exertion Games Laboratory at RMIT University of Melbourne in 2012. This quadcopter had a very simple task: find a runner by locating a unique marker on their shirt and then accompany them by flying ~10 feet ahead. Florian Mueller - Director of Exertion Games Lab - stated that the team was actually a bit surprised by the feedback from people that tested Joggobot because not only had it accomplished the original task of accompanying runners but it was also acting almost as a motivator; runners didn't want to stop until the drone did.

There were some limitations with the design including low operational time, the ability to track runners only when on a straight path, and loud noise coming from the blades. Regardless, Joggobot successfully demonstrated the potential of a fitness drone.

What's New?

Students at Hongik University in South Korea unveiled the Transverse drone - an AI powered personal fitness drone - in 2020 and it has all the features that consumers could expect from the first com