Drones

Search and rescue is a resource problem as much as a terrain problem. Municipalities, regional agencies, and national emergency services all face the same constraint: coverage is limited by how many trained people can be put in the field, and how fast. Drones change that arithmetic — if the aircraft can search on its own rather than requiring an operator each.

That's the problem DroneStar set out to solve. Read how they fit real-time detection and tracking into a drone's weight and power budget with the Metis® M.2, so one operator can supervise a whole pack.

 Power lines, wind turbines, rail corridors and bridges cover thousands of kilometres, and the drones surveying them generate more video than any operator can review. Running detection models on-board turns raw footage into findings: a cracked insulator, a corroded weld, a hotspot on a blade. The drone flies the route and lands with a defect report, not a hard drive. 

 Airports, substations, ports and industrial sites need eyes that never blink, and drones on patrol produce far too many hours of video to watch. On-board analytics track intruders, vehicles and unauthorised objects in real time, alerting only on what matters. Nothing leaves the airframe unless it needs to, which keeps both bandwidth and privacy intact. 

Hostile environments: avalanche zones, collapsed buildings and wildfire smoke; these are places with no bandwidth to stream video to a ground station and no time to wait. On-board vision analysis and perception brings real-time notifications, speeding time to recovery and reducing risk to personnel. These alerts can be pushed over a single narrowband link. Every watt saved on compute and erroneous data transfers is another minute of search time. 

 Blanket spraying wastes chemistry and money. A drone that can tell a weed from a seedling, or early blight from nitrogen stress, at the speed it flies, can act on each plant individually. Decisions are made in the air, over fields with no coverage, and the yield map arrives before the drone is back on the trailer. 

The highly cost-efficient, easy-to-integrate and future-proof Axelera® AI Metis® Platform accelerates equipment and software deployment by providing a comprehensive hardware and software solution for accelerating Vision AI in Security and Surveillance. While the hardware design enhances performance and reduces cost and power consumption, the usability of Metis makes vision AI technology accessible to a broader range of developers and enterprises worldwide, so they have the freedom to innovate.