4 Drone Startups Thinking Outside the Props

As drone technology evolves, leading to more agile and feature-rich UAVs, it’s inevitable that certain companies will rise to the top of the field. What follows are a few up-and-coming drone startups that may well lead the pack in innovation.

Skysense: A German startup, Skysense focuses on perhaps the most challenging and most important aspect of drone flight – power and on-ground support. The firm, founded by Michele Dallachiesa and Andrea Puiatti, offers a charging pad that “can be remotely operated [and] provides fast charging and wide landing area.”

The Skysense Hangar is exactly that – a protective hangar to store and recharge the drone between flights.” The charging pad is wireless — a UAV simply has to land on the pad to receive a full charge. “UAVs are an unprecedented opportunity to gather sensor data that has been very expensive to produce in the past,” Puiatti said. 

 

Drone Deploy:  Described as “Cloud Control for Drones: A Simple Web-Based Mission Planner,” Drone Deploy serves as a logistics-control system for UAV users. TechCrunch reports that the solution features: 

“Browser-based drone control; fleet management/tracking, with electronic filing of the required paperwork; data logging; automatic flight regulation assistance (Not allowed to fly drones after midnight in a certain region? DroneDeploy will remind you); automated log analysis that will help identify things like a motor that’s about to fail; expandability, by way of an App Store of sorts. (Want all of those pictures your drone can take to be stitched together into one big panoramic map view? They’ve got an app for that).”

Drone Deploy has already raised more than $10 million.

Skycatch: When Google backs your company, it’s probably a good sign of future greatness and Skycatch looks to be no exception. Skycatch offers “high-resolution aerial data solutions to construction, farming, mining and solar industries.” The San Francisco-based startup has raised more than $13 million.

According to Greenbiz.com, Skycatch can eliminate manual inspection of massive solar farms with millions of photovoltaic (PV) panels and spread across square miles of terrain. In doing so, the company says it can identify problem panels in 90 percent less time than normally required by equipping its drones with advanced thermography to perform diagnostics.

StitchCAM: With just a few weeks left in the StitchCAM’s Kickstarter, this project is the one that needs your help the most. The StitchCAM drone is a collaboration effort of PutDronesToWork.org and Project Addision to bring to market a cheap, easy to use quadcopter that can provide meaningful data to farmers right out of the box.

The teams’ patent pending V2 sensor provides ultrahigh resolution color images and near infrared vigor data in a compact, collapsible package.

If all goes well, each StitchCAM should ship with its own Google Nexus Tablet preloaded with all the necessary software so users can simply charge it, launch it (autonomously, of course) and immediately begin mapping a selected area in 3D.

Check out the team’s video below and help them out on Kickstarter here.

For more early-stage drone companies, check out this summer’s 5 Hottest Drone Kickstarters!