EagleEye Eyes American Market with New Sec. 333

A Brussels-based UAV firm is coming to America (minus the amusing, 1980s, Eddie Murphy plot device).

EagleEye Systems announced this week the approval of a Section 333 exemption by the FAA. The company, which now boasts a New York City-based office, will now have clear skies to release second-generation “drones with brains” into the domestic UAV market – especially within the growing sector of public-safety drones.

“This approval from the FAA is the result of many years of development of our platform to meet the very high standards required by U.S. authorities,” EagleEye Systems COO Ash Bhatia said in a company press release. He added that EagleEye will focus on “continually improving our platform to drive the next wave of innovation in the exploding commercial drone industry.”

Approval to market and operate in America represents another milestone for the growing company. In addition to developing what the company calls “the world’s first [UAV] Operating System,” the company unleashed a new stable of products in 2015 offering clients a new level of artificial intelligence-based property surveillance as well as for infrastructure monitoring.

While UAV surveillance and monitoring is on the rise, the new technology is not without its pitfalls — video and control links can be hacked, allowing anyone to see the images produced by a patrolling drone. Also, some systems may not produce stable images for monitoring due to poor gyros. The EagleEye system offers real-time, encrypted data streaming to “multiple ground stations, precluding real-time corroboration by experts.”

EagleEye uses advanced security and encryption protocols that link drone base stations with the UAVs in a cloud-enabled environment. The UAVs and operators can access live resources stored on the cloud. Accessible information can come from previous flights, or from stored data that can be retrieved and processed real time.

The company will target public agencies such as law-enforcement and firefighting departments across the U.S. as prospective clients. The Office of Emergency Management in Bergen County, N.J. has already begun to deploy EagleEye-equipped drones.

“We have always seen ourselves as the ideal choice for high-performance needs across applications such as search and rescue, firefighting, law enforcement and public safety,” Bhatia said. “Increasingly, we are also seeing users of first-generation drones in areas like private security, surveying, agriculture and infrastructure maintenance come to us.”