Thanks to Vtrus Drones Can Now Inspect Factories And Warehouses

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Knowing what goes on within large factories and warehouses is a mammoth task that requires a lot of personnel, a lot of time and, of course, a lot of energy from the employees tasked with it.

How about an employee that does not get tired? It also doesn’t need to get paid. Enter the Vtrus drone – a compact drone that creates detailed 3D maps of the indoor environments it navigates, autonomously, in real time.

The drone is called ABI Zero and it comes equipped with both RGB cameras and 360 ones. It also holds a structured light depth sensor. It starts mapping the environment around it as soon as it takes off, in a lot of detail: 300,000 depth points at 30 times per second.

With this information, it can roam around freely and all the data it gathers is uploaded into the Vtrus cloud service, where it can be accessed by human operators.

Credit: Vtrus Inc./ YouTube 

ABI is capable of flying for 10 minutes on a full charge. It sounds like a short time, but the drone benefits from a high speed charging box it returns to when it needs a charge. It’s contact-based and it only takes half an hour for a full charge, after which the drone flies right back up. Altogether, that would add up for six hours’ worth of fly time per day, which is really not bad.

At the moment, the team is still seeking investors for the project and ABI is just a prototype, but the Vtrus team is currently traveling to various facilities across the U.S, showing them how the system works and collecting feedback. Hard to imagine they won’t have a long list of customers pretty soon.