Flyability, Making Safe Drones for Inaccessible Places

Inspections in confined places have posed a significant problem for companies for the longest time. They put inspection officers’ safety at risk, and they cost businesses the loss of precious workdays due to asset downtime. These issues, combined with the high cost of scaffoldings, makes such inspections a significant hassle. It was this problem that the founders of Flyability set out to resolve with their innovative leaps in drone technology! 

Hitherto, drones were likely to be crashed while operating in confined spaces. But the company founders, employing their skills and knowledge of robotics, devised the schematics of caged drones that could safely perform inspections in confined spaces. The company is the first organization to achieve this feat! 

The industrial inspection sector and the commercial drones market were taken by a storm when this ingenious product came into the market. Among many industries, the following immediately took a liking to the solutions offered by Flyability: Oil and Gas, Power Generation, and Mining. 

Moreover, the company takes pride in offering safe, reliable, intuitive, cost-effective, efficient, and innovative products that cater to the customer’s needs and the well-being of inspection officers. 

The company was founded on the vision to delegate dangerous jobs to machines rather than humans. The destruction brought about by natural disasters and the use of robots for the help provided one source of inspiration for the company founder, Adrien Briod, to make new advances in robotics to tackle this problem.This led to strenuous and ingenious work that culminated in the making of Elios: a caged indoor drone made to enter confined spaces for inspection work.

This drone changed the face of the commercial drone industry! But it was only the beginning as the company further improved its drones. The big breakthrough came with the advent of Elios 2. Accompanying this drone was the software Inspector 3.0,which allows inspectors to create sparse 3D models showing the location of defects found in the drone’s footage. The company also sells a Range Extender that extends the range the drone can fly from the pilot, expanding the potential use cases for the technology.

Main Focused Area’s of Flyability

1. Heads of drone programs within large industrial companies.
2. Drone pilots at inspection companies that use drones.
3. Drone pilots at drone inspection companies (companies that primarily offer drone services).
4. Maintenance managers at large industrial companies.
5. Inspectors at large industrial companies.
6. Inspectors at third-party organizations that offer inspections.

Presently, Flybotix is the leading competitor. However, unlike Flytobix, the Elios 2 drone has been thoroughly field-tested over thousands of hours of real inspection work and is currently used at hundreds of facilities worldwide. Flybotix, on the other hand, is an emerging company that has not been tested or adopted widely

Most Prestigious Customers:

The company’s clients have: 

• Saved millions of dollars by using Elios 2 for visual inspections (see this case study) for a safety inspection—one client in the Maritime industry saved $2 million during a single round of inspections.
• Reduced downtimes by 98% on profitable assets (see this case study)for an inspection where a client in Power Generation reduced time for a safety inspection by 98%.
• Increased personnel safety by eliminating the need for confined space entry (see this case study for an inspection where a client in Oil & Gas eliminated the need for people to enter a cargo tank on an FPSO).
• Increased personnel safety by reducing radiation while doing inspections at nuclear plants, helping them fulfill the mandate of ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) to lower radiation exposure wherever possible.
• And significantly increased their ability to access areas for visual data collection that could not otherwise be accessed.

Some clients have expressed interest in adding new sensors to Flyability’s drone, such as LiDAR, to operate in confined spaces while collecting detailed data to enable the creation of 3D maps.

Most Prestigious Products and Their Features:

Elios 2

An indoor inspection drone designed to be collision tolerant and confined-space accessible. The drone can collect visual data in any confined space with GPS-free stabilization and distance lock technology.

The Elios 2 camera drone is equipped with a thermal and 4k camera, with 10,000 lumens of dustproof and oblique lighting, making defects easy to spot. All flights have full HD live streaming.

Inspector 3.0

The software that accompanies Elios 2’s visual data. Inspector 3.0 allows inspectors to review the visual data collected in-flight, bookmark notes frame to frame, and create a sparse 3D model with points of interest documented, classified, measured, adjusted, and overlaid with thermal data.

Range Extender

The range extender allows the Elios 2 to cover more ground by connecting the range extender directly to the Elios 2’s remote antennas, ultimately placing the antenna closer to the drone, especially when obstacles are present.

Most importantly, the company also offers the services of training personnel to operate the drones and corresponding software.