A great deal of publicity has been given to the emerging survey sector using drones as workhorses. Early adoption of these technologies has brought forward the first commercial revenue stream for a number of operators, with infrastructure inspections a frequent task.
The Sky Hopper team has been looking further into the future and we now have a number of interesting contacts and associates who are looking at the potential of “droning” operations on a regular basis to enhance knowledge and understanding of coastal regions.
We are lucky in that our Scottish home base provides easy access to a very long length of coastline. (Scotland in fact has a longer coastline than England). But think about it, if you are proposing to survey a coast using line of sight operations that potential is highly limited. You could spend half a day or more getting to a survey site, and you probably would not be able to design a simple pass-by survey line; you would likely be limited to some rather haphazard flying about attempting to collect photographs.
How much better to use a mid-mass vehicle with flight durations upwards of half an hour across extended cross-range survey vectors. That’s what Sky Hopper offers. If our cargo module is a reconnaissance version, we could do anything from counting seals, through plotting kelp beds or algae, to tracking oil spills or plotting serial data about levels of localised pollution.
The drone industry is coming of age, but it needs a platform for more extensive surveys with better flight path control and sensing capabilities, including on board processing to collect very large amounts of data. While we see Sky Hopper as a logistical platform, we are not blind to its potential as an enhanced global survey platform. Of course, we can also combine the two roles, using its carrying power to drop off point based survey equipment across terrain of interest – and then pick it up again at a later date. In difficult to access areas, that could reduce access time and costs by an order of magnitude.
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