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Unmanned Advantage

By Vertical Mag

story by Lisa Gordon | photos by Mike Reyno | July 3, 2014

Published on: July 3, 2014
Estimated reading time 16 minutes, 47 seconds.

Aeryon Labs specializes in building rugged aerial data-gathering platforms that get the job done and can be operated by just about anyone.
Unmanned aerial systems technology was in its infancy back in 2007, when three University of Waterloo graduates founded Aeryon Labs, Inc. Like so many small business start-ups, the company was born in a home office—moving from a backyard to a basement, and then to a living room—before settling into office space in Waterloo, Ont., in the heart of Canada’s Technology Triangle. 
Aeryon founders Dave Kroetsch, Steffen Lindner, and Mike Peasgood met after graduation, when all three were working at PixStream, a cutting-edge firm in Waterloo specializing in producing hardware and software solutions for distributing and managing digital video. The company was acquired by Cisco in 2000, but was subsequently shut down a year later. With a common interest in robotics, Kroetsch, Lindner and Peasgood seized the opportunity to strike out on their own. Their goal: to bring a capable, reliable and easy-to-use small unmanned aerial system (sUAS) to market. 
Today, Aeryon specializes in producing quad-rotor, tablet-controlled aerial vehicles, weighing about five pounds and operating in the VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) class. The systems, which company president and CEO Dave Kroetsch said are positioned “at the high end of the market,” are sturdy devices that are quickly assembled in the field without tools, and can be operated by anyone. 
“We saw a need for this type of technology,” said Kroetsch. “Being engineers ourselves, we found a way to bring that technology to the average user. We’ve designed UAS systems for the backpack of the soldier, the trunk of the police car, or the pickup truck of the power lineman, to operate and do inspections with an untrained operator, who is not a pilot.” 
Indeed, Aeryon’s engineering focus is driven by three important concepts, identified early on by company founders
as the keys to success: flight performance, reliability, and ease of use. 
“We have built a system from the bottom up to be rugged, reliable and easy to use,” explained Kroetsch, who added that Aeryon completes all final assembly and testing in-house. “We have the highest performance in our class; our system can fly in wind gusts up to 90 kilometres per hour (kph), and we test it very rigorously. Every system is 100 per cent tested, from every propeller to every camera to every battery, because reliability is extremely important to our customers. And, if you can use Google maps, you can fly our product. It’s as simple as pointing and clicking and the system flies itself.” 
GROWTH AND DEPLOYMENT 
From the early days when its three founders represented the entire staff, Aeryon has grown rapidly. At the beginning of 2014, the company employed 50 people; six months later, there are 75 on staff at the company’s new, 40,000-square-foot headquarters in Waterloo. 
Its product line has grown, too, as technology has evolved and the company has gained a foothold in the marketplace. After doing extensive research to discover what capabilities and characteristics customers were looking for in a UAS, Aeryon released its first system, the Aeryon Scout, in 2009. Since then, hundreds have been sold and are flying a myriad of missions around the world. 
“We’ve been in a lot of really interesting places, which has allowed us to prove the capabilities of our system,” said Ian McDonald, the company’s vice president of product and marketing. “The Scout has been deployed with militaries around the world. In 2013, we launched the Aeryon SkyRanger — which has taken everything we learned from Scout to the next level.” 
The applications for Aeryon’s sUAS systems are limited only by the imagination. The units are primarily used for data gathering—mostly imaging, whether colour, thermal, near-infrared or multi-spectral—and employ different types of sensors. Scout systems are currently used by several military and government organizations, as well as law enforcement agencies around the world, and a wide variety of commercial operations. The Scout’s big brother, the SkyRanger, was introduced last year to government and military customers, and is expected to be released to civilian organizations soon. 
“On the commercial side, a lot of the applications are inspection or surveying tasks,” explained McDonald. “For inspections, I’m trying to look at a structure that is hard or unsafe to access, such as a roof or a bridge. In surveying, I’m trying to map an area where satellite imagery is out of date, and it’s too expensive or time-consuming to collect imagery from other sources.”
Other real-world applications for small unmanned aerial systems include inspecting oil and gas flare stacks as well as pipelines, mapping post-harvest forests, and performing wildlife population studies. 
In one example, an Aeryon Scout was used by biologists at the Idaho Power Company to visually survey the number of Chinook salmon nests in the Snake River during spawning season (mid-October to early December). The mission had traditionally been performed by helicopter; but a fatal crash in 2010 led Idaho Power to search for an alternative method of data collection. 
In 2012, they performed weekly surveys of the river using an Aeryon Scout, and found it delivered the data they needed. Although the Scout, with its 25-minute battery life, was unable to overfly the entire river, it allowed biologists to program in the exact same geographical waypoints for survey sections. Its high resolution camera captured repeatable results for comparison purposes; which, in turn, enabled an accurate estimation of the salmon population’s total size. 
The Scout is also used by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), the agency responsible for policing the province’s 400-series highways. After a major traffic accident, the Scout is deployed to survey the scene for the purpose of accident reconstruction. 
“Previously, the OPP would manually take measurements to determine how fast people were going, the impact forces, etc.,” said McDonald. “That can take an hour and a half to two hours, to do a complex accident scene, and it’s vulnerable to disruption (if something gets moved). Our system can capture images of the accident scene, essentially flying a grid, and the images are stitched together using Aeryon software. In a 10 to 15-minute flight, they can get about 50 images.” 
McDonald said it’s a simple matter of drawing a box on the tablet over the accident scene. The sUAS calculates its flight plan and the operator simply puts it in the air and sends it to the starting point, before pressing play. “The system does everything else automatically. Images are stored on an SD card. It’s very easy to use and highly repeatable, and it makes a big difference to how people do their jobs.” 
In one test scenario carried out by the Halton Regional Police Service (HRPS), use of a Scout sUAS allowed officers to significantly reduce the time needed for accident scene evidence-gathering. 
Constable Andy Olesen, coordinator of the explosives and ground search units at the HRPS, is one of the Scout handlers. He told Vertical that the Halton police service began investigating UAS technology about six years ago. After a chance meeting with Aeryon reps at a trade show, Olesen said the HRPS applied for a federal grant to study UAS systems as they applied to policing. 
“That’s where we got our funding, and one of the conditions was that we had to share our findings with other law enforcement agencies,” said Olesen. The HRPS received close to $120,000 in 2012 for the purchase of a UAS and associated officer training, making it only the third police service in Canada to have one. 
One of the reasons the Scout was chosen, Olesen explained, was that Transport Canada only required two operators for it, since flying the system is largely a computer-driven process. “A lot of the other systems are more hands-on, traditional remote controlled units, and Transport Canada required three operators for those,” he said. 
Olesen said integrating the Scout into police procedures has been a learning process. “The technology was new when we started, so we’ve learned a lot the hard way,” he said. “As the years have gone by, there are better imaging systems, software processing, and more capability.” 
So far, the sUAS has assisted police with recording evidence at homicide scenes, searching for missing persons in hard to access areas, acquiring real-time images for tactical purposes, and mapping traffic collision scenes. “To have the aerial perspective of the whole (accident) scene and to be able to take measurements is a big application now, but it will be even more so (in the future),” said Olesen, a 26-year policing veteran. The technology looks even more attractive when one considers the economic impact of closing an arterial highway for several hours in order to investigate an accident. 
The ability to provide aerial imagery for tactical operations is the main reason why militaries around the world are flying Aeryon unmanned aerial systems. 
“We have customers from the special forces to deployments in the Middle East,” said Aeryon’s Kroetsch. In November 2009, a Scout was used to perform reconnaissance on a Central American drug lord’s compound. The sUAS was programmed to launch from a kilometre away, and to overfly the compound at a height of 39 metres (127 feet), where it could be neither seen nor heard. In a 12-minute flight, the system took 14 photos of the target and recorded six minutes of video, which were subsequently used to devise a successful plan for raiding the compound. 

MATURE SYSTEM 
Aeryon builds versatility into its sUAS devices. “Our systems are designed to work when it’s hot, it’s cold, it’s dirty, it’s wet,” said Kroetsch. “We understand that our operator could be working on any day, not just on a nice calm day, and they could be working in any environment. So our sUAS work from -30C (-22F) to 50C (122F). Our systems pack very small. And, since it’s a tablet-based interface, you tell it where to go; you don’t fly it. That means a new pilot can fly in as difficult weather and wind conditions as an experienced pilot.” 
Although they’re cutting edge, they’re not cheap: Aeryon’s small unmanned aerial systems are priced between $50,000 and $100,000, depending on the model. 
But McDonald said it’s not hard to quantify the value proposition. “You see a lot of products that look like this with four rotors,” he said. “But ours is a mature platform; we’ve been doing this since 2007. We’ve gone through the growing pains of building these systems reliably in volume. The other things that separate us are those core performance technologies. We pioneered our user interface and we are moving it forward. It’s reliable in extreme temperatures, and flight performance is excellent—it can fly in sustained winds of 65 kph (40 mph), and wind gusts up to 90 kph (55 mph).” 
Compared to traditional methods of data collection, Kroetsch added that the cost of an Aeryon unit is minimal. 
“Our product is not inexpensive, but the return on investment is absolutely there for our customers. It’s very measurable,” he said. “Some of the applications are being done by manned aircraft today. There’s the high cost of fuel, and the requirements for maintaining large aircraft, and the capital cost of large aircraft. With our system, there’s almost zero operating cost because it’s all battery operated.” 
As well, he said, Aeryon’s sUAS are quickly deployed and can access hard to reach places where larger manned aircraft can’t go.
PRODUCT EVOLUTION 
With the SkyRanger, Aeryon has evolved the sUAS model to make it even easier for users to get the job done. It’s lighter with a foldable frame, and flies for twice as long as the Scout, for a maximum of 50 minutes. As well, the SkyRanger’s integrated high defi¬nition sensors (dual electro-optical/infra-red) eliminate the need to change the camera payload—it’s already there, all in one. Users can be trained to operate Aeryon’s simple map-based interface in just two days, including in-class and in-field sessions. 
McDonald said Aeryon will continue its product evolution. “Scout went through five mechanical iterations,” he said. “Software is continually released; we’re constantly adding new features like AutoGrid, to help customers do whatever they need to do. It’s really a software and payload platform—as we move forward, we’re thinking about how to integrate with different systems for different applications.” 
Kroetsch believes this is only the beginning of the unmanned revolution. 
“We saw it first with the proliferation of toys, and that’s really moving into mainstream markets at the professional level,” he concluded. “We have customers in the buy-and-try phase; and other customers like BP who are doing everything from oil spill cleanup work to flare stack inspection, who are now looking to roll these solutions out worldwide. I think we’re going to see a real proliferation of these, and I think you’re going to see them everywhere.”

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