Avetics Global fly high at Tank Storage Awards
Singaporean UAV company clinches top award at global oil tank conference, beating 13 other international competitors
29 March 2018, Netherlands. Avetics Global has won the Most Innovative Technology Award at the 2018 Tank Storage Awards held in Rotterdam for its Aquila In-Tank Inspection Drone, with the panel of judges selecting it against a crowded field of thirteen competitors from around the world.
The Aquila In-Tank inspection drone prevailed over other innovative solutions such as virtual reality visualisation, project management, robotic task automation and flexible storage solutions.
“The team at Avetics is pleased to have be conferred this award, it is a good encouragement to our hard work, “ said Zhang Weiliang, CEO, Avetics. “Looking ahead, we definitely would like to improve on capabilities such as autonomous navigation and explosion proofing to further expand the use case”
The judges of the Tank Storage Awards had identified human error as the biggest threat to terminal operators, with robots being the next big development in the storage sector to “significantly bring down cost for maintenance and inspection activities and shorten out of service times”.
Built specifically to address these problems, the Avetics Aquila is a semi-autonomous confined-space drone designed to perform an internal inspection of oil tanks, representing the culmination of two years of research and development by the Singaporean UAV company.
This is the second year in a row drones have won the Most Innovative Technology Award, with the previous years’ winner being the Flyability Elios drone. Current in-tank inspection procedures require the erecting of scaffolding for technicians to access areas at height, directly affecting tank utilization rate and work-at-height risk. The risk of drones losing control in an all-metal environment due to radio frequency interruption has spurred innovation in developing solutions to address this very problem.
The Avetics Aquila provides close range visual intelligence at reduced risk to operators, generating an uninterrupted and unobstructed stabilized live feed with position localization thanks to onboard lasers. Unhindered by radio interference, the Aquila is able to quickly and safely obtain high-quality location contextualized images in such a challenging environment.
These capabilities are what allowed Avetics to prevail over other innovative solutions shortlisted at the Tank Storage Awards.
