Advanced drone system developer sees.ai has won a share of £30m from the Future Flight Challenge, part of the government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.
The company is leading a consortium of eight partners including Sellafield, Atkins and Skanska in developing an advanced drone system that will allow pilotless drone access to the hardest to reach areas of industrial landscapes. This is expected to permit better and faster exchange of information between offsite and onsite teams, helping increase productivity, boosting health & safety of onsite workers, and reducing the number of visits to site overall.
The technology brings together human pilots operating in a control room with highly-automated drones on the client’s site to allow the remote execution of complex missions at close quarters on industrial sites. This solution will allow the remote capture of aerial data on an enterprise-wide scale, the consortium says.
NATS, the UK’s main air navigation provider, and Vodafone are technical partners for the project. Sees.ai’s solution will be operated by drone service provider Terra Drone, for tests with clients Skanska, Atkins, and Skanska Costain Strabag working in partnership with HS2. Sellafield’s in-house drone team will test the sees.ai system on its site.
UK-based sees.ai was founded in 2017 by four leading engineers from Apple, CERN and McLaren, to develop a “beyond line of sight” drone control system.
In total 34 projects are set to receive a share of £30m through the Future Flight Challenge. Over the next few years, the FFC will distribute £125m from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.