Cleo Robotics' drones fly into tight spaces to gather data.
February 09, 2023
Cleo Robotics' drones fly into tight spaces to gather data
Robots have many advantages over humans and the most prominent is their ability to access places and environment that humans cannot access or is hazardous. However, the many advantages of robots or drones are clouded by the biggest limitation which is their smooth maneuvering or movement in tight interior spaces, and they can be easily damaged in these environments.
This has resulted in limiting their application to outdoor uses only like surveillance and aerial inspection, and as offensive, defensive, and humanitarian applications around war zones. The drone and indoor robot technology needs improvements in terms of being easier to control, less damage-prone, and equipped with new features like data-collecting sensors, a broader area of applications could be unlocked.
Boston-based Cleo Robotics is working on improving the technology. Using its Dronut, a decade-old concept of ducted aerial vehicle technology, the company is working to improve it to create a drone that is small, easy to control, and has no exposed blades. This makes the drone ideal for tight, enclosed indoor spaces.
CEO and co-founder of Cleo Robotics, Omar Eleryan, told Fierce Electronics that the inspiration for Dronut comes from his own experience in the oil and gas industry and his personal in flying machines.
“I grew up in Calgary, Alberta, which is the oil capital of Canada,” he said. “I studied mechanical engineering there, and after college, I did what pretty much every mechanical engineer there did, which was get a job in oil and gas. But I didn't study mechanical engineering to get into oil and gas. I actually did it because my passion has always been flying things, rockets, airplanes, that type of thing.”
“I had to inspect several pieces of equipment that were pretty dirty, and hazardous types of environments, and I thought people shouldn't be in there,” he said. “Instead of sending people to these environments to carry the cameras and take pictures of everything, why not just send a robot? …Well, at the time [a flying robot] pretty much meant quadcopters, and to a large extent still, they're not really well suited.”
Cleo adopted the ducted design which does not include exposed propeller blades and allows changes of direction in the air enabling more precise control and stable operation in flight. The new ducted design reduces the overall size of the drone and increased efficiency.
“The Dronut has advantages over other types of drones, like quad-copters because it is much smaller, and because it’s a lot more efficient that means it can carry more sensors to capture more data while getting into some tight spaces,” Eleryan said. “The problem [with ducted drones] was that they were too difficult to control, so we thought if we could actually figure that out, we would have something that's pretty valuable–and we did figure it out.”
These new advancements in the technology have helped Cleo to ride its Dronut platform into several industrial markets. Cleo recently scored a major deal in the military and defense sector. The company’s TacDronut was chosen by the U.S. Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office for a $2.5 million contract. The company won the contract in an Army Innovation Day Competition.
The ability of Dronut to operate in GPS-enabled and non-GPS environments helped in securing the win. Equipped with onboard intelligence and sensor payload that makes it highly capable and reduces the burden on soldiers.
Dronut already has secured a huge customer base ranging from nuclear power plants to oil and gas companies to heavy industries, Eleryan said. What they all have in common is that they want drones to be used to collect, analyze, and process different types of data that would otherwise be very difficult or hazardous to collect.
According to Stratview Research, the demand for indoor robots is likely to witness impressive growth in the coming years. The growing use of robots in the domestic sector and their use in security services drive the growth of the indoor robots market globally. The development in R&D activities and the increasing trend of connected homes, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are likely to further strengthen the market in the coming years.
Indoor Robots Market Highlights
Indoor robots are robots that are used for service purposes indoors such as in households and others.
Indoor robots are available for several purposes such as cleaning robots, medical robots, security and surveillance robots, public relations robots, entertainment robots, personal assistant robots, and also education and research robots.
Based on the robot type, the market is segmented as cleaning robot, medical robot, security & surveillance robot, public relation robot, entertainment robot, personal assistant robot, education, and research robot. The medical robot segment holds the largest market and is estimated to have substantial growth opportunities in the coming five years. The high demand for these robots drives the growth of this segment.
Some of the indoor robot manufacturers are Aethon, Cobalt Robotics, Ecovacs Robotics, Gecko Systems International Corporation, InTouch Technologies, Inc., Intuitive Surgical, Inc., iRobot Corporation, Knightscope, Inc., NXT Robotics Corporation, and Omron Adept Technologies, Inc.