drone ‘astria’ has a rotating motor to keep it steady for inspection climbing

Inspection climbing

Born from the desire to help with inspection climbing, Astria by Pitch Aeronautics is a hybrid-cyclorotor drone optimized for up-close and touch-based robotic tasks. It can put a five to 10lb payload near or in contact with an elevated target as the company states. ‘The way industrial inspections are done today is largely unchanged from how they were done decades ago. They are ascending to great heights, putting themselves in harm’s way, and performing these inspections that are very manual and labor-intensive,’ says Ian Gibson, the company’s co-founder and business lead. The company believes that the inspection industry through drones would supplant these types of inspections, but it turned out that they could not do it because of the way their mechanisms move. With Astria, Pitch Aeronautics steps in to offer their help through a drone that can perform up close and touch-based inspections.

images by Pitch Aeronautics

Pitch Aeronautics

Pitch Aeronautics’ patented ‘cyclorotor’, or a rotating motor position at the top of the drone, allows Astria to thrust forward, backward, or sideways without the need to lean. The company prides itself that because of the installed machinery, Astria can weather all types of winds and instability, making it steady in flight regardless of the strength of the gusts. Astria’s 5-10lb payload is also positioned at the end of a sensor arm to keep the sensor or tool from the rotors, allowing it to interact with the inspection or maintenance target. This arm can be quickly swapped to provide the right tool or sensor for the job at hand. Though the drone looks heavy and bulky, Astria collapses down to fit inside hard cases, check on a flight, or put in the back of a vehicle. The cyclorotor-based drone can be assembled or disassembled within minutes as the company claims. It also features a swappable battery that can provide additional 20 minutes of flight time with a full payload, and the company is already looking into providing a tethered solution for even longer endurance applications.

drone ‘astria’ has a rotating motor to keep it steady for inspection climbing

Avoiding obstacles

‘On bridges, inspectors will take crack cards and manually put up a small ruler essentially to the crack and write down in a notebook what the width of a crack is. We have made a new sensor that when we get it up close to the bridge, it can more precisely, more accurately characterize those cracks faster and keep a great record of them,’ says Zach Adams, the company’s co-founder and chief engineer. To add, Astria can avoid obstacles and hold positioning even if GPS satellites are obstructed or jammed with its flight sensors mounted in every direction, paired with optical flow cameras. The company also thought of a first-person view by installing an onboard camera, paired with virtual reality goggles, to allow users to fly Astria as if they were in the cockpit, turning them into pilots to precisely position a sensor or tool up-close or in contact with an inspection target, even on part of an inspection target that is not visible from the ground.

sensor view