 Hey guys, welcome to Rotorat. I'm LaDriven. Today we're teaming up with SkyPersonic to push the limits of drone inspection. SkyPersonic is a drone company that specializes in making drones for confined spaces operations. So they've got this drone that can fly around warehouses, assembly plants, power stations, inside pipes and tubes, and in areas that you need to get into and inspect certain areas. And what's really great about this is sometimes these areas are either hard to get to or difficult for a human to be. So doing these types of operations with drones is not only more efficient, but it's also a lot safer than sending human into a dangerous space. SkyPersonic calls their drone the Skycopter. And it's a pretty wild looking thing. It's a quadcopter contained in this bubble shaped cage. And essentially it's able to bounce off things without there being worry about damaging the drone or the thing you're bouncing off of. And having that full 360 degree coverage makes this drone something that people are a lot more comfortable having flown around their areas of sensitive equipment or machinery. The camera is on a tiltable servo, which for an FPV pilot is kind of a weird thing. Normally when we fly our drones, we have a fixed angle because we're cruising at a high speed. But when you're doing an inspection, you're not only flying at slower speeds, but sometimes you even need to bring it into a hover. And so it's really nice to have that flexibility to maybe look up at something or look down at something. The way the camera module is designed, I think it's pretty ergonomic and it looks really good from a visual perspective. Other inspection drones out there in the market, you will see wires hanging around. We don't have any wires out here. Everything is through the PCB. I personally like the front head of the drone with the carbon fiber rods coming through. It just looks aggressive in my opinion. I mean, I like designing things that look appealing and much better to the eye. One of the coolest pieces of technology that SkyperSonic has developed is called remote piloting. It gives a pilot the ability to remotely command a drone from anywhere in the world over the internet. So with their technology, I can be sitting in my office flying a drone in Italy. And that's exactly what we're going to be doing. We've been working with them to play with this technology for a while. We actually did a previous episode where I flew a drone that was in Detroit while I was standing here in the Rotorad headquarters in Florida. And today, we're pushing it even further and we're flying a drone that's not only in another country, but on another continent across the Atlantic Ocean. How did remote piloting even come about? Like, why did you guys create this? We couldn't support our customer in the pandemic area because the pilot needed to be to the customer side and we couldn't go. So we see all we die or we have to invent something to make sure that we can assist our customers with our drones. And so we invented the remote piloting, be able to fly the drone, even though the pilot was in our premise, stalking in his house for the lockdown and the drone was in the customer side. And then we discovered that could open us a very great future in the sense of remote piloting for inspection. So we built it up for training our customer. Because you have a crisis like COVID, you invent something to get over it and then that becomes basically one of your main focuses. A lot of companies had to invent ways to continue working in a situation like we never had before in our generations. So the ultimate goal is to deploy a SkyPersonics Skycopter piloted remotely to inspect a live power plant. SkyPersonics is working with Iran to pull off exactly this. But before we go straight to that, we want to be absolutely sure that we can depend on the gear and that the pilot is equipped to the challenge. So before we do any flight that poses any risk to anything beyond the drone itself, we're going to test this technology and perform a flight in a warehouse. So this will actually be the first time that we are piloting the drone strictly over a 5G connection. So they're going to take the 5G hotspot into the warehouse and I'm going to fly the drone using that internet connection. I'm going to go up and just kind of take a close look at one of these hanging things, you know, like we're like we're looking at something. Yeah, it gets a little squirrely when I try to like orbit it, you know, because I can't like my timing isn't normal. Yeah, but we can just bounce off it. No problem. That's awesome. This is so cool. So we've proved the technology can work. We were able to fly around the warehouse. I was able to get in close proximity to some of the beams and there was no real problem using the 5G internet. It was actually really impressive how seamless the whole thing was. And the next step from there is to go into a more complicated space and actually do a more real inspection. So this time we are headed to ENI in Sicily and we're going to be flying in one of their properties that needs inspection because it is in a pretty bad state of disrepair. It's actually scheduled for demolition pretty soon. And they need to know what's going on inside there. Is it safe to actually send any people in there? Is the roof coming down? Like what's going on? And this is the perfect time to deploy an inspection drone. What I didn't know is because of this collapsing roof I mentioned, they had put in a net in case anyone did have to go in there. So while this might have made it a little bit safer in case there was a reason that someone had to go deeper into the building, it made it a lot more challenging for flying a drone. Even though we're flying a high definition video link, nets are pretty small material. Even with your actual vision, it can be kind of hard to make out a net until you get pretty close to it. So now imagine you're flying a drone through a camera. Sometimes you might not see it until you're right on top of it. So having to navigate the walls and a floor of net is really challenging. But once I was in there, it was okay. The biggest challenge I had was going too fast. I just want to go, man. I just want to flow. Let's hit some power loops, right? They're like slower, slower, slower. Very difficult because essentially I was having to bring the drone into a hover, which I'll tell you is actually harder than flying with momentum. Like when you are flying forward, you know where the drone is going. You have that motion as a constant state of reference. You know your trajectory. There is a trajectory. When you're in a hover, it can be pretty difficult to see a little bit of drift building up. And before you realize it, you can all of a sudden be where you weren't expecting to be and hit something. It's time for the big one, IREN. This is an active power plant, currently supplying power to many cities in Italy. If something were to go wrong, it would be catastrophic to wipe out power for that much of a country. So even though we had tested the drone, tested the technology, and we're very confident in it, there's always going to be a little bit of nerves. And I could feel it in the room even through the computer. I've got it. It's showing up on my screen. Go slow, go slowly, much lower than this. Here, can you take it and reset? Okay. Rotate to 180. Rotate to 180. Okay. Or just put it to the... Okay, can you see me? You guys got it? Of course, the day of the event, we're having connectivity issues. We had no problem in the warehouse. We had no problem at E&I. The 5G connection was always reliable. But of course, when it comes time to do the big one, we were having some issues. That's why it's always important, no matter how confident you feel to kind of test things out before you go in there. So before we were even considering sending the drone into the area with sensitive things that you don't want to hit, we just tried flying kind of up and down the walkway with an on-site pilot ready to take over and disarm if anything went poorly. And indeed, we had some issues. The video lag was insane. I mean, flying a drone over the internet in another country, you can expect a certain amount of latency and you just have to accommodate for it and take it nice and slow, but this was beyond a point of flyability. I mean, I was just watching instant replays of bumping in this stuff. It was bad. We had to stop for a minute, take a second, get some people to turn off their phones. And it also turned out that we had to move the hotspot to a location that you would have thought would have been worse reception. They had originally positioned it so that the hotspot kind of had a line of sight down the hall to kind of an opening in the building. And for some reason, it wasn't getting good reception. And for whatever reason, putting it closer to the corner of the building got us better signal. Sometimes you just can't explain what's going on with radio frequencies. But it worked. We had much lower latency and the drone was finally pilotable. So after a couple more practice runs, we were ready to go into the plant. The only real sense of things that had all painted yellow, we stayed far away from that, but I was still pretty nervous being inside that tight area. I was a lot happier once I got out and just had to go up to the crane. Let's take a look at the crane. I never thought I'd have so many nerves just sitting in the office staring at the screen to my computer. It was a pretty intense experience, but we did it. We pulled off the inspection. Erin was really happy. And I think we showed just how far drones have come and just how far they can go. So guys, leave a comment down below. What are you most excited about for the future of drone technology? If you enjoyed this video, hit the thumbs up to let us know you had a great time. Guys, if you're new here, hit the subscribe button so you don't miss a single video. And if you want to be extra careful, you catch everything we're posting, hit the bell. Guys, I'm Lidrib. I'll see you next time on Rotoride.