Drones are a multipurpose technology being designed and repurposed to contribute to resilience. From assessing the vulnerability of remote infrastructure assets to making public spaces and buildings safe for use during Covid-19, drones are rapidly turning into one of the major technologies used in risk assessment and data generation for resilience.
Our case studies range from drones enabling healthcare systems to reach rural, cut off communities to image capturing drones creating 3D maps of public infrastructure to assess its vulnerabilities.
Far from just being a novelty for social media videos, drones are contributing to the resilience of infrastructure, helping keep people and systems safe from shocks and stresses.
Zipline
Garuda Aerospace
Bentley Systems
"Where you live shouldn’t determine whether or not you get a COVID-19 vaccine, we can help health systems bypass infrastructure and supply challenges through instant delivery."
Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo
Zipline
Zipline drones deliver critical and lifesaving products precisely where and when they are needed. Zipline’s battery powered drones have a range of 100 miles round trip and can complete on-demand deliveries in 30-45 minutes, helping overcome transport and delivery barriers. With the outbreak of COVID-19, Zipline’s service helped supply medical supplies, Covid-tests and PPE to remote and hard to reach communities in North America and Africa. Drone delivery has improved COVID-19 testing in Ghana, reducing wait time from hours or days to just a single hour. Zipline also reduces unnecessary hospital visits and lowers the risk of exposure for non-infected patients by extending the reach of the healthcare system to areas closer to their home.
With vaccine programmes now rolling out around the world Zipline’s drone functions are also stepping in to help deliver vaccines from distribution centres to rural communities. The process involves creating a temperature-controlled distribution process, eliminating the need for ultra-low freezers at rural distribution centres.
Garuda
Chennai based startup Garuda Aerospace design, build and customise unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones for various applications, from aerial mapping to agricultural surveyance and sanitisation. With the arrival of COVID-19 they applied their UAV expertise to help combat the spread of COVID-19. Their Corana Killer (CK) UAV aid in the sanitisation of crowded locations such as markets, metro stations, airports, schools, hospitals and government offices which otherwise would have been an impossible task for public workers to undertake a manual spraying process. It also reduces the risk to public health workers of contracting or spread the virus.
The CK 100 sanitisation drone consists of patented autopilot technology, advanced flight controller system, and is equipped with fuel efficient motors that enables the drone to be deployed for 12 hours in a day. Garuda Aerospace’s present fleet of 300 Corona Killer-100 drones can conduct sanitization operations covering 6,000 km every single day and disinfect around 3.28 million sq kms across India to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Bentley Systems
A form of reality modelling, Bentley System’s Context Capture software creates 3D models from simple photographs and/or point clouds including drone captured imagery.
Reality modelling is the process of capturing the physical reality of an infrastructure asset, creating a representation of it, and maintaining it through continuous surveys, facilitated by drones. ContextCapture, provides infrastructure owners and operators with real-world digital context in the form of a 3D reality mesh.
Overlapping photos from drones and ground-level imagery, supplemented by laser scans where needed, ContextCapture enables the generation of spatially-classified and engineering-ready reality meshes at any desired level of accuracy and scale, including an entire city.
The software has been used around the world across including in the city of Helsinki to make a 3D representation of the city for multiple uses, surveying dams in northern Italy to assess deterioration and in Western Australia to identify hazards in mine and port facilities.
