Last year was a quiet turning point in the use of flying robots in an unexpected space: Indoors. Increasingly sophisticated sensor and mapping technologies, machine learning, and engineering and materials science have combined to enable drones to operate inside — often overhead — in enterprise applications like inspection and inventory management.
The drones span sectors like oil and gas, which have long been adopters of drones for outdoor inspections of pipelines and infrastructure, but also retail and grocery. A company called Pensa, for example, makes drones to scan store shelves and track inventory. Verity Studios, founded by Kiva co-founder Raffaello D’Andrea, makes drones with failsafe algorithms to keep them stable in the event a propeller fails. That measure of safety has allowed Verity to put on extravagant indoor stage shows using drones as performers. Another company called Flyability makes drones for indoor inspection and exploration, and its Elios 2 drone, a confined space inspection UAV, has been a trailblazer in terms of case studies.
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