Scout 137 Drone System

The Scout 137 is designed for GPS-denied, hostile environments with little or no ambient light. Atmospheres may be toxic, with little oxygen. There may be dust, debris, risk of falling and entrapment. Such places are often not suitable for human entry. But they’re still in need of inspection and structural integrity assessment.

It’s easy to find motivation for using indoor drones instead of human entry in many indoor industrial inspection tasks. But still, getting the right tool for the job is vital. To perform a safe inspection and gather good data, you need a tool that lets you focus on the job, provides the best possible data and enables easy sharing and reporting.

Watch the video and read on to learn more about the Scout 137 Drone System.

Q1/2023: The next-gen Scout 137 arrives

The current Scout 137 is the best and most advanced Scout 137 Drone System so far. If you want to know more about the recent updates to the system, please refer to this article.

Onboard Lidar provides safe flight and better data

ingScout 137ndoor industrial spaces often suffer lack of GPS coverage, which leaves most off-the-shelf drones without the reference needed to maintain stable positioning. If there’s also a lack of light, optical sensors and Visual Positioning Systems (VPS) will not work and you’ll be flying manual. The drone will be subject to competing, uncoordinated influence from the pilot and the environment. The flight path may become jumpy and irregular, introducing motion artifacts into your visual inspection data and worst-case causing a crash.

3D Lidar to the rescue. The Scout 137 Drone is designed around a 3D Lidar sensor that enables the drone to map its surroundings in real time, with sub-centimeter accuracy. This data is used for the safe and stable flight, as a visual aid to the pilot and for location-tagging all the inspection data from your flight.

Patent-pending technology ensures that live sensor data is translated into a 3D map of the environment, including the drone’s position and heading. Joystick input from the pilot is combined into the processing and “corrected” by sensor data before affecting motor power.

The Scout 137 Drone knows immediately if it has been unintentionally displaced by gusts of air, propeller blast or other factors, and is able to correct that itself. The result is a drone that is easy to fly, maintains position when no manual input is provided, and moves with smooth and even motion. It will avoid obstacles and can perform “smart moves” like sliding along walls at a fixed distance. Even with curved, irregular surfaces.

Read more about the benefits of 3D Lidar here.

BVLOS/no-man-entry, situational awareness and location-tagged data

Flying a drone in confined industrial environments with just the drone camera as visual aid, can be a daunting task. Self-similarity, repeating structures, lack of peripheral vision and insufficient ambient light soon becomes distracting and bewildering to the pilot.

There will also be cases when humans shouldn’t enter the inspection target, and flying the drone beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) is the only safe option. 

The Scout 137 Drone’s 3D lidar data is also used to render a 3D situation map on the tablet used by the pilot during flight. This 3D map is shown picture-in-picture with the drone’s camera feed, and can be freely panned, zoomed and rotated. It is an indispensable visual aid to the pilot, showing the drone’s position and heading inside. When the pilot gets this situational awareness of the space, navigation gets easier and stress is relieved.

Since 3D mapping is available at any instant, all inspection data is also tagged with position and heading on-the-fly, for easy review and reporting in our online inspection data portal – the Scout Portal.

Read more about the benefits of 3D Lidar here.

Gimbal-stabilized 4K camera and powerful LEDs

As a result of Lidar-powered stability, the Scout 137 Drone also produces crisp visual inspection data with consistent and smooth framing. The onboard 4K camera is mounted on a 2-axis stabilized gimbal that is pitch-adjustable between+/- 90 degrees, to cover inaccessible ledges, ceilings etc.

The onboard lighting rig provides over 10 000 Lumens of light and has flexible control options to let you make the most out of it: Depending on the situation, you want even lights but need to dim them now and then to avoid glare from specific surfaces. Or sometimes you may need to create shadows to emphasize thin cracks.

Read more about camera specs and image quality here

Inspect the drone in 3D

The Scout 137 Drone is made to simplify your indoor inspection duties and improve your data-driven decisions. Now you can inspect the drone! The 3D model allows you to look at it from any angle, zoom in and out and read the text captions.

The ground station provides the drone with power, control signals and a data network via the tether.

The Scout 137’s tether system supplies power to the drone and allows stress-free inspection with no limitations on flight time. No need to worry about changing batteries. You can take your time while flying and make sure you capture the right data. Need to discuss something with your team mate while working? The drone will wait, mid-air, steady as a rock.

The tether also provides a robust wired data link, where location-tagged inspection data flows back to the ground station and can further be streamed live to the Scout Portal, when an internet connection is present.

Tether

The tether itself is a custom made high-quality product. It has excellent cut resistance and a smooth outer surface to be able to slide over beams, rails etc. without catching. It has high-visibility coating and halogen-free flame retardancy as recommended by its application.

The tether easily plugs in to the ground station and the drone, and is secured with carabiners that relieve stress and secure the connection. The tether is rolled up on the provided coil and stowed away inside the ground station box after use. Current tether length is 40 m.

Ground station

The Ground Station connects directly to wall outlets, generators or battery packs. If relevant, we also provide a suitable battery solution mounted in the same type of case as the rest of the drone system. The ground station can be connected to the internet via on-site LAN/Ethernet.

The ground station receives all control signals from the pilot to the drone, via the tether. Read below for more info about this 

Connecting the Ground Station to the internet

If you have internet available via a local LAN on-site, you can connect the Ground Station to the internet using the LAN connector on the front panel. This enables  live inspection streaming to the Scout Portal, our cloud-based inspection data management service.

This is a useful work mode that allows inspection teams on-site to cooperate with off-site stakeholders live during inspection.

Being able to collaborate and discuss the inspection as it happens, you can make important decisions much sooner and shave hours and days of inspection time. Even avoid site revisits.

The pilot operates the drone using a controller and a tablet

In summary, the connection chain between pilot and drone looks like this:

Pilot -> controller and tablet -> connection hub -> ground station -> tether -> drone.

The controller connects to the tablet using a fully wired USB connection. The app provides full control of the drone’s systems and displays the camera feed and 3D Lidar point cloud in real time. Due to the autonomy and navigational aids built into the drone system, you will be able to perform advanced flight patterns with simplified flight controls.

The user can register “normal” or “flagged” POIs using short or long clicks on the right-hand index finger button, respectively. Whenever a POI is created, a thumbnail photo of it is shown in the bottom right corner of the tablet. Clicking this opens a full 4K preview photo of the POI, allowing the pilot to consider further action while still on-site, flying.

Learn more about these functions here.

Wired drone control 

Metal structures in buildings can create problems for wireless transmission of data and control signals. Therefore, we have chosen to implement a robust wired connection all the way from the pilot’s controls to the Scout 137 Drone.

The controller and the tablet both have wired connections via a hub to the ground station. The ground station forwards all control signals to the Scout 137 Drone via the tether.

This prevents multipath distortion and interference from other sources from compromising drone control.

Controller Specs