Shell, BP and Statoil have all voiced interest in the use of small Vertical Take Off and
Landing (VTOL) unmanned multi-rotor air vehicles, to act as stabilised sensor platforms gas
flare stack inspections: it would significantly reduce the cost of the inspections. The questions
to be confronted by us are:
• how big is this market?
• what are the market dynamics?
• what we need to do to make money in this market?
We have developed and successfully tested a six rotor VTOL air vehicle, suitable for use as a
sensor platform. Multi-rotor platforms have advantages over the traditional helicopter:
• simple direct drive propellers: no complex mechanical parts to perform the traditional
helicopter cyclic and collective functions;
• no wasted power in a tail rotor, needed to stop the helicopter body from rotating;
• lower vibration and noise levels: important for sensors.
Another application is in high voltage power line inspections. The monitoring of a gas flare
stack and of a high voltage power line involves sensing in a potentially hostile environment:
• gusty wind conditions up to 35 km;
• large electromagnetic fields from 400 kV power lines;
• proximity to the flame in a gas flare stack.
In these applications, the user needs a stable sensor platform, with sub-metre 3D spatial
position hold capability. From experiments we have performed using our hexrotor VTOL
(HVTOL) sensor platform, with a high frame rate high-resolution optic flow based navigation
unit, we have confidence in our ability to hold the position and attitude of the HVTOL sensor
platform, to enable precision remote sensing of gas flare stacks and power lines.
We propose to investigate the nature of the global market and the financial and technical
feasibility of developing our HVTOL sensor platforms, for use in remote sensing in hostile
environments. We have developed prototype software for use in the management of a swarm
of sensor platforms.