Flyability

The Challenge

Flyability’s market includes industrial, energy, material handling and storage companies as well as governmental infrastructure departments. It is used in inspections of cargo ships, bridges, ports, and steel mills (amongst many other environments). From cement factories, liquid gas tanks, and nuclear facilities, to city wide underground sewage systems, these industries and applications all share steep regulatory and safety requirements for their facilities that not only protect their business investments, but ensure the safety of their employees and the public which they serve.

Previously, inspections were completed almost entirely manually. This was an extremely time consuming process that was not only costly and prone to error, but also frequently required an inspector to engage with dangerous scenarios such as high scaffolding or unsafe mines. In certain instances, such as the decommissioned nuclear plant V in Chernobyl (seen here) manual inspection would have been completely impossible.

The Solution

Providing inspectors with tools such as drones that allow them to increase the efficiency of their inspection without being subject to the danger they previously faced is certainly an attractive proposition within the industry and one that Flyability is taking a unique approach to tackling. The largest barrier to its success, however, is crashes. From the beginning Flyabilty took a unique approach to this challenge and seeked out methods and solutions that would make their drones collision tolerant, rather than attempting the sisyphean task of planning for every potential crash or collision scenario. This is one of the primary reasons Flyability chose to use Ouster.


Flyability uses lidar for a multitude of purposes within their application. As inspection flights frequently will not have a direct line of sight and occur in GPS denied environments, one primary function of the OS0 is to provide incredibly accurate and reliable localization and mapping capabilities, so that the drone can find its way out of whatever area it is inspecting. Moreover, the 3D models that companies and inspectors require demand centimeter precision accuracy that only lidar can provide.


Ouster was able to provide Flyability with industry leading specs in all of their required areas while meeting their demand for durability and ruggedness that allows their drone to be deployed confidently in extreme environments with collision tolerance.

As an example of these extremes, Ouster joined Flyability along with a team of climate scientists and cave explorers in Iceland. On the Fagradalsfjall volcano and Vatnajökull glacier, the Elios 3, equipped with Ouster’s OS0, flew into newly formed lava tubes where temperatures could easily exceed 180 degrees celsius and occasionally even top 300 as well as in expanding glacial caves exposed the freezing cold and with constant exposure to moisture and dripwater. While these kinds of extremes aren’t what Flyability encounters in its daily tasks, pushing the limits of what the Ouster and Flyability systems can handle is a great way to ensure their success in their more practical, everyday, applications. Check out Vice News’ documentary about the project.

Results

The implementation of Flyability’s solution has solved not only these issues of accessibility and safety, but has also helped companies realize unbelievable cost and time savings. The TVA (The Tennessee Valley Authority), the largest public power provider in the United States since 1933, was able to cut 470 hours (out of a total of 480) off of the necessary inspection of just one single facility, resulting in a 98% reduction of time needed to complete such tasks; In a single test, Pampa Energía, the largest independent energy company in Argentina, was able to realize cost savings of $420,000; And Maritime Inspection Services helped an oil tanker management firm realize a cost savings of $2 million by reducing the time of inspection from eight days to one.