By Jesse Mathews
With the increasing capabilities of new drones and technology, companies and individuals will come up myriad with new and innovated ways to use them. Skycatch is one of those companies.
Skycatch allows you to hire out their drones and pilots for data capture services. It can provide site Annotations, 2-D measurements, 3-D measurements, Thermal Heat Map imaging, and Plan Overlays. This is incredibly useful for construction, mining, nuclear plants, farming, etc.
Skycatch offers two separate types of data capture, including Short Range On Demand capture robots. These drones offer a quick and easy capture system from just above a site, with a higher resolution than satellite imaging. Most small to medium sized quad copters can operate for about 25-30 minutes on a full battery, which is why the short range copter package includes a battery swapping ground station. Switching batteries takes less than 5 minutes and the copter is back in the air capturing data.
The second package they offer is Long Range High Altitude data capture robots. These thin drones fly below satellites, and maintain an altitude higher than the main jet stream. These drones can provide broad sets of data regarding your site. This drone is useful for large areas of land, such as farms.
Uses in Construction/Mining Industry
The short range copter can provide calculations of volume for stockpiles, concrete pourings, and most other materials within a 15 minute flight period. Along with this, it can also provide simple pictures of your job site on demand, or at scheduled intervals. Useful for maintaining a construction schedule and recording progress of building. The drone can also make topographic maps of your site if needed, allowing you to see the grades of piles.
Uses in Farming Industry
The biggest, and perhaps most important piece of data that Skycatch can offer to farmers is Multispectral NDVI. Using this, farmers can check vegetation and irrigation levels of their crops on an autonomous schedule. This would allow farmers to clearly see where they need to change irrigation methods without having to spend hours or days waiting for plants to wither and die, causing loss of crops. This would save time and money for farmers, and allow for more crops to be grown successfully. On a different note that is interesting but that has less of an impact is the use of the drone to see if people are stealing crops.
Uses in Nuclear Plants
The drone also has thermal data capture. The Thermal Imaging can let workers know of hot and cool spots within the plant on demand or on a schedule. Although nuclear meltdowns are infrequent, they are like flash floods. There isn’t much warning until alarms start going off, and its too late to fix the problem. With Skycatch, drones could keep track of how hot or cold parts of the plant are and relay that to the plant supervisor. This allows for warning of problems before they arise, instead of after. This could potentially bring the number of meltdowns that occur to zero due to the precautions already in place at nuclear facilities.
The People Who Make It Happen
CEO and Founder of Skycatch Christian Sanz is a Navy Veteran with a long background in Business as well as software and technical development. He founded Skycatch in 2013 and since it has been used by large companies around the U.S. Thanks to his and his teams work, Skycatch has become one of the fastest growing autonomous aerial mapping companies on the market. When he first conceptualized Skycatch, he envisioned it with safety, strength, and reliability in mind.
CTO Sam Miller oversees most technical operations issues and makes sure that the drones run smoothly and gather data efficiently. He used to work at Intel with 18 years of experience running a company and leading large teams of engineers. With this experience, he has enabled Skycatch to take off and be truly innovative.
Miller and Sanz have put a lot of effort into this company, and it has paid off. With new drones and technology being introduced all over the world, Skycatch will make sure they keep up and grow even bigger.
