Excerpt from TechInAsia
It’s true autonomous drones are being employed in enterprises, where they’re starting to be used for security and surveillance. But operating them is labor intensive and costly.
SwarmX’s mission is to change that. It wants to make entire drone fleets – and not just individual drones – easy to command ....
One key piece of this system is a literal Hive – a weatherproof docking bay for drones. Once the robot lands, the door opens, and the landing pad slowly descends into the Hive with the drone, like in a sci-fi movie. The landing is made using precision infra-red sensors, which Pulkit says are more accurate than GPS.
Once inside the metal cocoon, the drone charges its batteries through a conduction plate. A full charge takes 45 minutes. In that time, it transfers data to a processor in the Hive, converting it into a smaller format, at hundreds of megabytes instead of gigabytes.
The data is viewable over a local network, which is more secure than transferring it to clients over the cloud.
Hives can be deployed on-site in remote locations, for example at a gas pipeline an oil company wants monitored. All you need are three drones to conduct 24/7 surveillance, since they can take turns to patrol the skies and replenish their power. Almost like a real beehive.
Pulkit aims to partner up with the most popular drone manufacturers – think DJI and 3D Robotics – to make the Hive compatible with most models.
