KEF Robotics, a drone firm based in Pittsburgh, was awarded $1.5 million by the United States Army for research and development purposes.
Since the firm didn’t officially begin operations until December of 2018, this is the single biggest contract win they’ve received.
“Our platform-agnostic, attachable approach to aerial autonomy positions us well to provide safe tethered flight in dynamic and complex environments,” KEF Robotics Co-Founder, Eric Amoroso said in a statement. “The tethered system allows us to tightly couple the visual sensing on the ground vehicle and Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS), from which our system uses both machine learning and stereo vision techniques to probabilistically map difficult hazards like power lines and tree branches.”
The tethered method of handling drones that KEF employs entails anchoring power and data cables to the ground and attaching the aerial systems to those cables.
According to the company that developed this technology, this enables their drones to fly “nearly indefinitely without recharging, providing a local, continuous overwatch capability to ground assets.
The contract will fund KEF to develop advanced computer vision algorithms to fly tethered autonomous drones through an urban environment in day or night conditions. This development will speed KEF’s ambition to provide vision-based autonomous flight to any aircraft, even in GPS denied environments.
Traditionally, tethered platforms have been constrained to provide security for stationary assets. In this Ph. 2, KEF will study the use of tethered drones for highly mobile ground platforms by leveraging infrared and electro-optical sensors, machine learning algorithms, and powerful computation to build a dense and long range map of its surroundings.
This real-time map generation, paired with KEF’s planning and navigation modules, will allow the drone to autonomously avoid obstacles while moving in an urban environment at high speeds.
