Custom Drones

Asteroid Inspection with Drones

Custom drone developed for mapping in an asteroid inspection project testing space exploration methods.

Testing space exploration methods with drones

With the recent success of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, it has become apparent that autonomous UAVs have a bright and exciting future ahead of them. Although drones from Earth can not be used directly in space, they are extremely useful for testing and enhancing the technology that enables space exploration.

Fly4Future was part of one such effort in a project at the University of Bremen, Germany. The KaNaRiA-NaKoRa project was focused on the development and validation of autonomous near-field navigation of cooperative spacecraft for landing on small planetary bodies.

Custom drone for fast deployment and mapping

Custom drone for fast deployment and mapping
The major goal of the project was the hardware-related development of the navigation and landing units for small planetary bodies, such as asteroids, comets and moons. At the end of the project, the methods and algorithms were tested in the volcanic landscape of the El Teide National Park on Tenerife. The volcanic environment provided an analogue for the rocky surface of asteroids and moons.

The custom drone from Fly4Future provided the necessary test-bed for the methods developed by the team at the University of Bremen. The platform was equipped with powerful 3D Lidar (Ouster) and 3D cameras. Along with an open-source autonomy engine, it has a standalone system designed for fast deployment. This reduces the amount of time spent in the hardware and software systems configuration stage before deployment and helps the team focus on the task at hand.

Application

sourcing rich 3D data about the environment
outdoor mapping of archaeological sites and historical buildings
mapping of outdoor construction sites

The mobility of the drone provides an additional advantage as the sensor can be moved into different configurations or tight spaces, which is challenging enough for humans or even other robots.