On Friday, May 14, FlytBase, in partnership with Hextronics, hosted FlytLaunch to unveil the Hextronics Global drone nest, garnering the interest of over 350 tech enthusiasts, including, drone solution providers, drone hardware and software product companies, and businesses looking to automate their drone-based business operations.
What’s in the Box?
The Global comes with a rugged, weatherproof, IP 66 (pending) enclosure made out of anodised aluminium. It is ideal for a wide range of outdoor applications and can operate in a temperature range of 5oC to 35oC (40oF to 95oF), with the ability to further extend this range to -30oC to +65oC (-20oF to 150oF) for areas with extreme weather conditions. The base unit weighs only 70 lbs (approx. 32 kg), which makes it quite portable and travel-friendly, while still offering enough resistance to a theft.
The Global can house any of the DJI Mavic 2 series of drones. It elegantly addresses the challenge of long charging time of these commercial, off-the-shelf drones with its advanced robotic battery-swapping capability, boasting a groundbreaking downtime of just about 90 seconds. The base unit can hold up to 5 additional batteries and it keeps them fully charged while the drone is away on routine missions.
To provide fully autonomous operations, the Hextronics Global comes preinstalled with the reliable FlytNow Auto software, which provides cloud connectivity and the ability to remotely command and control the drone & docking station through its interactive command center, FlytNow Hub. Additionally, the software includes a powerful precision-landing module which enables the drone to autonomously land on the docking station with centimeter-level accuracy, every time.
Additional Offerings
The Hextronics Global offers 4 optional add-ons to further enhance its capabilities: extreme temperature control, integrated cellular service, a mounted weather station, and a flight range extender. One of the most popular features, the weather station, allows users to measure several critical parameters, such as wind-speed, air-pressure, temperature, humidity, and rainfall. These parameters are not only visible on the FlytNow dashboard, but can also be used to set various pre-flight checks that are critical for ensuring safety of fully-automated deployments. For example, the drone will not be allowed to take off if the wind-speed and/or rainfall is above the user-defined thresholds.
About Hextronics
Hextronics LLC is an engineering company based in Miami, FL (USA), that builds products to facilitate autonomous functionalities for the growing drone industry. The drone-station solution offers benefits to reduce operations cost, optimize flight-time, increase the drone-transmission radius, and extend battery life.
About FlytBase
Founded in 2016, FlytBase, Inc., a Silicon Valley company, has built the world’s first Internet of Drones (IoD) platform, providing drone-agnostic software solutions to automate and scale drone operations. FlytBase offerings are compatible with major drone hardware platforms (e.g., DJI, Ardupilot, PX4) and come with SDKs, simulators, and APIs for reliable testing and seamless integration. FlytBase was a part of Cisco’s accelerator program and was recognised as the Grand Champion at the NTT Data’s Global Innovation Contest in 2019.
Source: Press Release