HYPACK AERIAL DRONE HOW TO
HYPACK AERIAL DRONE SOFTWARE

Can you speak to the major differences in what is commercially available? Kevin: There are two major categories of autonomous vehicles in water those that operate strictly on the surface and those that can dive underneath. There are a number of automated vehicles on the market for water quality and quantity monitoring.

In the future, I fully expect these systems to be substantially more accessible based on volume alone. It also helps that the aerial drone market has taken off in recent years, as drones often times share similar onboard computers and positioning systems. But we're at the point where vehicle demand is at an all-time high, which gives us economies of scale with suppliers to reduce the cost of common components. Geoff: Absolutely! The price of these systems is highly dependent on the complexity of the integration work.The autonomous vehicle market is relatively new.We've been defining it over the past 18 years and many of our vehicles have been one-off, custom solutions.As with most things in life вЂ“ if itвЂ™s a custom solution вЂ“ itвЂ™s bound to be more expensive. In the future, as sensor manufacturers design their instruments to more easily integrate into larger systems that will help eliminate a lot of this additional cost. As consumers, weвЂ™re not just paying for the sensors or even the vehicle they fit into, but also the expertise of companies like SeaRobotics to integrate the entire package together and make it work.

HYPACK AERIAL DRONE HOW TO

How are companies working to make autonomous vehicles more accessible for a wider group of researchers, government agencies, and environmental organizations? Kevin: In the past, the challenge with these types of integrated vehicles was how to get all the sensors interoperable to an on- board data acquisition system, and then pulling the data into a common user interface. The HYPACK integration also allows the new vehicle to do what we call вЂmission planningвЂ™ вЂ“ where you setup the device to collect data autonomously using geospatial references, satellite imagery or oceanographic charts.

HYPACK AERIAL DRONE SOFTWARE

Geoff: Yes, and all the data feeds directly into HYPACK software, which is a staple of the surveying world.This software provides a unique user interface where you can visualize and process the hydrographic data youвЂ™re collecting in real time. These sensors are built into a small, yet incredibly durable package from SeaRobotics thatвЂ™s easy-to-deploy and easy-to- transport. It is capable of not only bathymetry measurements and cross- sectional geometry measurements, but also water velocity measurements.With this information combined, it can also calculate water discharge in rivers, inlets, and so forth.

HYCAT is a fully integrated system designed to accommodate a complete payload of environmental sensors from YSI and its sister brands at Xylem.The vehicle accommodates an EXO multi- parameter water quality sonde, a SonTek M9 Acoustic Doppler Profiler, camera and sidescan sonar systems as well. MISSION: WATER 14 SURFACE WATER i3xo Ecomapper Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Can you speak to the collaboration between Xylem and SeaRobotics on autonomous vehicles? Kevin: Just recently,YSI, a Xylem brand, has partnered with GeoffвЂ™s team at SeaRobotics to develop a brand new ASV called the HYCAT.

Hypack aerial drone