Hello again from John,
We’ve been running around with some projects recently and unfortunately the blog posts dropped off.
During one of the short breaks, we were visited by Inga Khchoyan from Flyability and Jan-Albert Viljoen from Gammatec, who are the African distributers for Flyability.
Who are Flyability? Flyability build the Elios range of drones for indoor and confined space use. These are drones with a crash resistant cage, used to carry out inspections within mines, inside large machinery such as industrial furnaces and more.
The Elios range was one of the first caged drones available for commercial sale. We recently assisted another operator with the inspection of a chimney stack over 90 meters tall. The on-board lighting of the Elios allows for detailed inspection almost anything without sending people in the area to set up lighting. This makes your inspections quicker and more importantly, safer.
Inga and Jan-Albert visited us with the new Elios 3. This is a quantum leap over the version 2 that we flew in the chimney stack. The addition of a LiDAR unit is a game changer.
The LiDAR allows the drone to use SLAM, Simultaneous Location And Mapping, algorithms. SLAM does exactly what the name suggests, it allows the drone to locate its position within a space and map out the space at the same time. The drone can be physically moved around, and it will return to its position within a few millimeters.
SLAM gives us two things. A stable drone which can find its way back. And a highly detailed 3D model of the item. This can be compared to the drawings to ensure there is no deformation, and to measure the extent of the deformation.
And of course, the Elios has visual and thermal cameras, allowing the pilot to carry out detailed inspections.
At UAV Inspection, we come from an inspection background in the oil and gas industry. Hardware like the Elios is the reason we started to work in the drone space. Innovative tools that allow the inspections that our clients need, while improving safety and reducing cost and time.
Do you have an impossible to enter space that needs inspection? Contact us and we can work with Flyability to complete the work,
Till next time, fly safe,
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