Winston-Salem based software developer Small Footprint has been awarded a research and development contract with Melbourne Florida based Aeronyde Corporation to build autonomous flight management software as part of key technology for unmanned and robotic aerial vehicles.
Under this contract, Small Footprint will initially design and develop proof-of-concept flight management capabilities for Aeronyde Corporation’s commercial drones. Aeronyde intends to introduce a multi-use UAV platform for Emergency Response and Utility Inspection sectors. Their full-service provider business model will allow customers to access on-demand UAV data collection services without the need to own or operate the equipment. Initial capabilities of the System of Systems (SoS) include route planning, autonomous navigation and sector-specific mission execution. The companies plan to complete and demo these capabilities to partner municipalities and government agencies later this year. Additionally, Small Footprint and Aeronyde will focus on collecting flight data, with data capture, exchange and analytics becoming another core in-house capability.
Aeronyde Corp, a privately funded start-up in the Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) sector, sought out Small Footprint for this project due to the company’s extensive agile development experience and its fast, iterative approach to prototyping. “Systems developers and integrators must collaborate and pursue global standards harmonization. UAVs have the potential to revolutionize data collection, infrastructure maintenance and logistics, but not until airspace is properly shared and managed to enable low-altitude Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations,” says Alexander Bilous, CTO of Aeronyde. Parallel with NASA’s UTM research initiative to be completed in 2020, Aeronyde and Small Footprint are focused on addressing the barriers of UAV integration into manned-airspace. The commercial UAV sector is still in its infancy, although the pace of technology adoption has been increasing with $120BB in revenue projected by 2020 (PwC Technology Forecast).
“The commercial UAS market is in its infancy but poised for tremendous growth and value creation,” said Richard Starets, CEO of Small Footprint. “Aeronyde has a compelling vision of the future and we are very excited about this partnership.”
Source: Press Release