Is this the world’s only autonomous indoor security drone?

Drones are increasingly playing an important role in the security industry. With their unique abilities such as reaching places that are inaccessible to humans and covering vast areas that are difficult to monitor, UAVs are fast becoming a preferred option for security professionals.

Helping this trend are the developments in the drone industry. With the growth of technologies like artificial intelligence, deep learning and machine learning, drones are becoming intelligent, powerful and most importantly autonomous.

Quite a few companies have come up with autonomous surveillance drones. These include the likes of Aptonomy and Nightingale Security. But for the most part, such self-flying machines have been meant for outdoor use.

Now, there is a company that claims to be the only one that offers an autonomous indoor surveillance drone. Arctic Robotics, a Vantaa, Finland-based company offers a fully autonomous indoor drone platform for security and proactive monitoring, saving costs and increasing the quality of security systems.

Speaking to asmag.com, Niko Oksanen, CEO and Co-founder of the company explained how their solution was unique and made a difference to the security industry.

“We are the only company providing fully autonomous indoor flying solution, where the drone is just the platform, but including our cloud services for both controlling and fleet management, [it is possible to] to view the live or stored video safely via any modern browser and can be easily integrated into existing operative control room systems,” Oksanen said.

We are the only company providing fully autonomous indoor flying solution

-Niko Oksanen, CEO and Co-founder, Arctic Robotics

The company’s drone uses 2D Lidar-based navigation system to move around inside a building. It is fully automatic, using predefined routes. Elaborating on this further, Pauli Isoaho, CTO and Co-founder of Arctic Robotics added that the drone uses rotating Lidar to measure the distance to walls and sonars for obstacle avoidance.

“Also we use sonars and Lidars to measure distance to floor and ceiling,” Isoaho said. “Our system comprises of automatic charging station and cloud service. We don't build drone frame ourselves, but we do navigation logic and own the total solution, so our work is 80 percent software and 20 percent hardware.”
 
Factors expected to drive demand
 
Oksanen believes that in Europe and most of the world, people are increasingly becoming highly educated and this limits the scope for finding potential labor in several sectors. To counter this issue, more and more companies will opt for robotized services that will give them the provision to grow their businesses without having the need to hire more people. This is especially true of the low-level labor that can be classified as difficult and pays less.

“The other key driver is that our solution will totally bring new business possibilities in various industries,” Oksanen said. “For instance, many monthly or yearly based inspections can now be automated for daily inspections or even 24/7 inspections with multiple autonomous drones flying.”

In security and fire business the main problem is false alarms, as over 90 percent of all alarms are considered as false alarms. In most cases, these are verified by humans, increasing the costs for the owners. With Arctic Robotics’drone solution, it is possible to verify the situation within seconds of an alarm going off. With its flight to alarm functionality, operators can remotely decide if human intervention is required, which in most cases is not.