Brain inspired engineering gives sight to commercial drones
Intelligent Sense and Avoid Systems for Safer Drone Operations
Qelzal delivers an autonomous drone Sense and Avoid system using Image Free SensingTM combined with patent-pending, brain-inspired, artificial intelligence for rapid response and collision avoidance. We deliver an autonomous sense and avoid system that enables the commercial drone revolution with drone operations beyond line of sight and assisted piloting in difficult situations.
Will your drone see it soon enough?
Detection and Lighting
Commerical drones need to fly when the operators want to fly. However, diverse lighting conditions can make this hazardous. Traditional vision sensors can be rendered useless by many common factors such as reflected sunlight. To avoid obstacles when flying, drones need to detect them early. Failure to detect in time can lead to an aborted mission, or worse.
Size, Weight and Power
While powerful detection systems have been developed for airborne vehicles, those meeting the needs of most commercial drones are too large, weigh too much, and require too much power. Added weight requires more power which limits the flight time of the drone and flight time equals money for commercial drone operators.
Operational Reality
Regulatory requirements to keep your drone in sight at all times impedes the ability to perform many simple tasks. Operators must constantly be moving to keep their drones in sight. Without moving, circling a building, sweeping a bridge, or inspecting a powerline is not possible. Operators drive their trucks in a leapfrog fashion overcome the limits of their visual capability. It costs time and money.
Use Cases
Intelligent sense and avoid capability enables drone operations and improves performance. With its patented aircraft avoidance system, beyond line-of-sight operations become possible after regulatory approval. Even in uses where a dedicated drone operator is piloting, Qelzal offers an advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) for drone operators and assist them in detecting hazards in all light conditions and in blind spots around the drone.
Inspection
Inspection of infrastructure by drones is a safe, affordable alternative to hiring manned aircraft. Assisted drone flight is vital when gusty winds provide challenging positioning during close inpections. Beyond line-of-sight inspections save time and money by permitting operators to avoid constantly moving their ground station to keep the drone in sight.
Critical Delivery
Flying beyond visual line of sight by drones can save lives by providing autonomous delivery of critical medical supplies and equipment when emergency ground vehicles are blocked by traffic or aircraft transportation would be prohibitively expensive.
Situational Awareness
Live aerial video of a crisis in progress can change the very scope and operational approach of incident management. For example, firefighter operations can benefit from the safe operation of drones with sense and avoid working side-by-side with helicopter and aircraft operations.
Lightweight, low power sense and avoid commercial drone technology
works even in direct sunlight
Image Free Rapid Detection
Qelzal’s Image Free SensingTM combined with patent-pending, brain-inspired artificial intelligence for rapid response and collision avoidance systems process more streamlined data than large frame-based images. We use brain intelligence to extract the minimum to process with no need for computationally intensive object recognition algorithms in redundant image frames. Moreover, Qelzal system will not miss a beat even in high-speed situations or the fleeting flashing lights of an aircraft in the distance.
Low Power / Low Weight
Qelzal’s main sensors are passive and not active sensors. They do not transmit signals which can drain power rapidly, and are typically much lighter than active sensors for the same coverage. This means less overhead and less added weight resulting in longer flying time.
Works in Diverse Light Conditions
Qelzal’s superior dynamic light performance detects objects in extremely diverse light conditions. Obstacles can be detected when flying directly towards the sun or under the dim light of a quarter moon. It works even when bright light and dark shadows occur in the same field of view. This means more work time and more delivery hours even at night.
Sense and Avoid
Qelzal is committed to detection and intelligent response, creating a level of autonomous situational awareness for the drone platform that can avoid collision and resume the mission. For critical missions, such as delivery of urgent medical supplies to remote locations that can save life, an aborted mission is unacceptable. Qelzal combines multiple sensors and robust multiprocess detection techniques to eliminate false positives and make sure evasive actions are taken only when they are truly needed.