Troy’s Skypersonic and Florida-based Red Cat Holdings Inc. — both companies work on unmanned aerial vehicles — successfully completed a recent drone flight in Detroit that was controlled from Florida.
The firms believe the program represented the first commercial completion of a remote flight. Moving forward, the two entities plan to drive commercial activity with the technology, including among military clients.
Red Cat’s Fat Shark, a wholly owned subsidiary, partnered with Skypersonic, the manufacturer of the Skycopter UAC to complete the long-distance drone flight.
“The ability to control the flight of a drone from thousands of miles away should accelerate the commercial adoption of drone technology, expand the number of business services that can be provided by drones, and lower travel and training costs for companies deploying drones,” says Jeff Thompson, CEO of Red Cat.
The flight integrated Fat Shark’s new digital technology, “Shark Byte” with Skypersonic’s Skycopter and remote pilot software system.
“The combination of our recently launched Shark Byte digital system and Skypersonic’s patent pending software platform provides video resolution that will enable pilots to navigate more safely and execute commercial flights that were not possible with an analog system,” says Thompson.
The pilot’s flight instructions to the drone were transmitted through Skypersonic’s servers located in Italy.
“We are upgrading our entire fleet to the new Shark Byte digital system,” says Giuseppe Santangelo, founder and CEO of Skypersonic. “Global customers like Exelon rely on our drones to safely reach places that are difficult, expensive, and dangerous to inspect by manned teams.”
Shark Byte’s low-latency, high-definition video enables customers to take their inspections and security applications to a higher level of performance and safety.
“The combination of our Shark Byte 720p HD digital system and Skypersonic’s latency-compensating flight assistance technology enabled the pilot to fly faster and more skillfully than expected,” says Greg French, founder and chief technology officer of Fat Shark.
Red Cat provides products, services, and solutions to the drone industry. They also design, develop, market, and sell drone products through their three wholly owned subsidiaries: Fat Shark, Red Cat Propware, and Rotor Riot. Fat Shark makes first-person-view video goggles for the drone industry.
