Modified Drone — Elios. Works Where Others Can’t

Modified Elios

The Swiss com­pa­ny Fly­a­bil­i­ty has unveiled a new ver­sion of its Elios inspec­tion drone. For ref­er­ence, the Elios is a drone enclosed in a pro­tec­tive cage that allows it to oper­ate in tight spaces. Thanks to this 360-degree pro­tec­tion, the drone is able to con­tin­ue fly­ing despite col­li­sions with obsta­cles. Elios 3 is main­ly intend­ed for indus­tri­al and emer­gency use where the poten­tial of stan­dard UAVs is not enough.

Elios key feature

This is a Fly­Aware tool that com­bines LiDAR and NVidia graph­ics com­put­er to obtain SLAM (Simul­ta­ne­ous Local­iza­tion And Map­ping) data. This tech­nol­o­gy cre­ates a three-dimen­sion­al map of the flight envi­ron­ment, which is dis­played in real time on the screen of the Cock­pit flight instru­ment. It shows the path trav­eled by the drone as a point cloud mod­el. Fly­Aware pro­vides non-GPS assist­ed flight with cen­time­ter-lev­el posi­tion­ing accu­ra­cy and adds auto­mat­ic spu­ri­ous motion com­pen­sa­tion. This pilot­ing assis­tance makes chal­leng­ing mis­sions acces­si­ble to pilots of all skill lev­els.

Measurement processing

Fly­Aware data is sup­port­ed by Fly­a­bil­i­ty Inspec­tor 4.0, which is avail­able on a Win­dows PC. It allows you to view data on a 3D map, ana­lyze points of inter­est in a mis­sion, doc­u­ment, store and share infor­ma­tion. Fly­Aware data can also be inte­grat­ed into the GeoSLAM soft­ware pack­age for topo­graph­ic map­ping with accu­rate mea­sure­ments.

Key specification

The Elios 3 drone has a flight weight of 2.35 kg (with bat­tery, cam­eras, pro­tec­tive frame and LiDAR), mea­sur­ing 48 cm wide and 38 cm high. It has four brush­less motors work­ing in tan­dem with 5″ props that are also reversible, allow­ing it to get out of tight sit­u­a­tions with­out get­ting stuck. Fly­a­bil­i­ty ensures that the Elios 3 is capa­ble of self-tran­si­tion­ing into a fly­ing posi­tion if it rolls over. The device has an IP44 pro­tec­tion class: it is pro­tect­ed against sol­id objects larg­er than 1 mm and against splash­ing water in all direc­tions.

Battery life

Bat­tery — remov­able LiHV 6S 4350 mAh. Oper­at­ing time with­out pay­load from one bat­tery is about 12 min­utes. The pay­load bay has two ports. One is for LiDAR and the oth­er is for an aux­il­iary pay­load that extends the func­tion­al­i­ty of the Elios 3. LiDAR is an Ouster OS0-32 capa­ble of mea­sur­ing in dif­fi­cult envi­ron­ments such as dust and splash­ing water, with a work­ing dis­tance of up to 50 meters (in opti­mal con­di­tions ).

Camera system

In addi­tion to LiDAR, the Elios 3 also fea­tures a 4K/30fps cam­era with a 180° field of view capa­ble of cap­tur­ing images at a res­o­lu­tion of 4000×3000 pix­els. It is sup­port­ed by LEDs with a total bright­ness of 16,000 lumens with var­i­ous tilt angles to opti­mize illu­mi­na­tion in dusty envi­ron­ments. In addi­tion, there is a FLIR Lep­ton 3.5 ther­mal imag­ing cam­era that shoots in 160 × 120 at 9 frames per sec­ond. The cam­era is also equipped with a rangefind­er.

360 degree protection and crash resistance

It was this tool that brought Fly­a­bil­i­ty to the fore in 2015 when the caged Gim­ball drone won the Drone for good com­pe­ti­tion in Dubai. The cage is made of car­bon fiber with a flex­i­ble cov­er, mod­u­lar sub-com­po­nents for ease of main­te­nance, and ther­mo­plas­tic elas­tomer hang­ers. The bot­tom open­ing pro­vides easy access to the bat­tery, the front open­ing pro­vides easy access to the pay­load.

Piloting

The Elios 3 is pilot­ed using a radio con­trol sys­tem run­ning an Android tablet and Cock­pit soft­ware. It oper­ates in the 2.4 GHz band and has a straight line range of 500 meters. It can be sup­ple­ment­ed with a sec­ond radio con­trol to con­trol the cam­era inde­pen­dent­ly from the pilot.

About Flyability

Fly­a­bil­i­ty has pio­neered drones for con­fined space inspec­tion by cre­at­ing a new tech­nol­o­gy that allows inspec­tors to col­lect data remote­ly in dan­ger­ous con­fined spaces rather than in per­son. Since launch­ing in 2014, Fly­a­bil­i­ty has become a trust­ed provider of in-house inspec­tion solu­tions, pro­vid­ing remote data col­lec­tion through advanced hard­ware and soft­ware to inspec­tion pro­fes­sion­als to help them improve safe­ty, reduce down­time, and reduce the cost of in-house inspec­tions.

Today, Fly­a­bil­i­ty has offices in Switzer­land, Chi­na, Sin­ga­pore and the US, and near­ly a thou­sand cus­tomers in over 60 coun­tries. Fly­a­bil­i­ty works in every indus­try that requires inter­nal inspec­tions, includ­ing ener­gy, oil and gas, min­ing, waste­water infra­struc­ture, chem­i­cals, mar­itime, infra­struc­ture and util­i­ties. The offi­cial Elios 3 page can be found here, the Fly­a­bil­i­ty con­tact form can be found here.

A photo

Images pro­vid­ed by the devel­op­er.