Deme Partners with Airobot to build their drone operations
DEME, a leading premier Belgian dredging, hydraulic engineering and environmental solutions group, provides solutions for global challenges – overpopulation in coastal areas, increasing seaborne trade, and the rising global demand for energy and strategic resources – worldwide, daily.
“We are considering drones to improve the safety of our crews on our construction sites.” Says Lorentz Lievens, head of the survey department. ‘To create digital terrain models, our land surveyors must work amongst continuously operating bulldozers, excavators and dumper trucks. Additionally, on several sites it is not possible at all to use traditional land survey techniques, for example on recently reclaimed land. To remove them from hazard, we would like to create the DTMs using drones. “
Additionally, the offshore wind division is looking for a solution to inspect the foundations of the offshore wind turbines for corrosion. Today this is done manually using rope teams, which is not efficient and inherently unsafe. Drones are a good potential alternative.
“Airobot supports DEME to select and evaluate the state-of-the-art unmanned technology”, says Jan Leyssens, Managing Director at Airobot. “Together with DEME, the Xena-1 from Altigator has been selected to which we’ll add our own collision avoidance technology and centimetre accurate GNSS receivers from Septentrio”. Airobot also assists DEME to integrate the drones into their operations and organized the pilot training together with Fortio…
“We believe that the knowhow and expertise of the Airobot team can help us to introduce drones in our operations to make them safer and more efficient” says Lorentz. “Airobot wants to provide a complete solution to our customers”, adds Jan,” and believes in partnering with local suppliers to lift the drone technology to a higher level”
About DEME
The Group’s core business of dredging and land reclamation is supplemented by diversified activities that address different strategic drivers: hydraulic projects at sea, services to oil and gas firms, the installation of offshore wind farms, environmental activities such as soil remediation and sediment recycling, revalidation of brownfield sites and wreck clearance.
Its multi-disciplinary know-how and experience have allowed the DEME Group to grow into a global solutions provider. The Group owns one of the most modern, high-tech and versatile fleets for dredging and hydraulic engineering activities. Active since 1852, the Group’s solutions have never been more relevant than today, and this is reflected in its key figures: DEME employs 4,500 people worldwide and realized a turnover of EUR 2.6 billion in 2014.
About Airobot
Airobot turns drones into flying robots, to inspect difficult to reach areas or get an overview from above, meeting the professional user’s needs for safety, quality and increase the overall ROI. We create technology and integrates state-of-the-art collision avoidance, navigation and positioning technology to turn drones into flying robots.
We help drone manufacturers and integrators to build their own flying robots for inspection and mapping purposes. This technology is supplied to major drone manufacturers separately or as performance packages for inspection or mapping purposes:
Airobot also assists and supports companies to successfully integrate drones into their operations. We analyse their needs, define the best solution, select the most suitable hardware, combine it with our technology and coach the team during the implementation.
More information? Contact Jan Leyssens on +32 476 43 66 78 or via jan@airobot.eu
