Elios, Flyability’s New Drone for Inspecting Places that You Don’t Want to Be

Flyability today announced the release of Elios, the world’s first commercial collision-tolerant Drone.

Flyability has a different take on drones; they are flying drones but are housed in a spherical protective cage.   The design was inspired by insects and is designed to be used for the indoor inspection of complex or cramped spaces.

DroneLife sat down with Patrick Thevoz, the CEO of Flyability to see the drone in action and talk about how it is being used.

Applications include energy production and oil and gas facilities.   Think about the inside of boilers and steam generators and you get a good idea of the use case for Elios.   These plants  house very expensive equipment with expensive downtime when they need to be inspected or repaired.  Normally the process of repair or inspection requires scaffolding that can take weeks to set up and costs up to $100,000  to identify the source of a leak, or make emergency repairs.  Elios is designed to  reduce this effort from days to hours.

Elios is designed to industrialize the current product offering from Flyability.   It includes better BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) controls, enhanced transmission work (which was done in conjunction with DJI, and came about based upon a visit that Frank Wang had with Flyability last year).  The drone uses a FLIR camera, and was generally made more robust.

While the company has worked with a number of companies, it was able to cite work done with Chevron in internal tank inspection.

What does Flyability do best? “We offer safe operations for  inaccessible places, to avoid human injury in confined spaces.  Flyability is easy to implement, readily deployable, with an easily identifiable RIO”, said Patrick.

Flyability also recently announced a partnership with Sky-Futures for inspection.

More information on Flyability and the new Elios drone can be found here.