Exyn Technologies was founded in 2014, and in that short time has quickly climbed towards the top of the market for autonomous UAV solutions designed specifically for complex, GPS-denied environments. The ExynAero is their flagship aerial robotic solution, used to create 3D models of these complex areas. On Monday, at the start of Geo Week 2023, the company announced that the ExynAero will be receiving a facelift with a new partnership. Easy Aerial has been selected by Exyn to collaborate on the new flagship airframe, the ExynAero EA6, which will be integrated with ExynAI.
Prior to this partnership, the DJI M210 was the primary airframe for the ExynAero. That model is being transitioned to end-of-life by DJI, leaving Exyn to look for a new collaborator for their flagship airframe. In the search, which the company refers to as “extensive,” they were looking for a U.S.-based company to partner with in order to comply with regulations for their U.S. customers, while also providing high-quality hardware to users. Exyn also stressed that they would like to partner with a company with whom they can grow and evolve in an industry that is quick to innovate and changes on a dime.
Speaking with Geo Week News on the Exhibit Hall floor at Geo Week 2023 in Denver, Exyn CEO Nader Elm said, “we've been deploying on a variety of different platforms, but we're somewhat limited by what the platform is, the interfaces they have. So our collaboration and partnership with Easy Aerial is really just to optimize that.”
This new airframe will be built on the Osprey platform from Easy Aerial, which is a durable carbon composite hexacopter with motor redundancy to protect against individual failures. In their announcement of this partnership, Exyn notes that the Osprey platform will be particularly beneficial for the company’s customers in the construction and mining industries, but also makes sure to note Osprey is a Blue sUAS certified platform by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which makes it especially advantageous for Exyn’s work in the government sector.
The integration of ExynAI is key for this airframe, as this is the technology which powers the autonomous capabilities of Exyn’s product lines. The company’s aerial robots have achieved level four autonomy – the second highest level of autonomy for drone technology which allows for pilot-less flights in complex environments – and are starting to be used more on construction sites. This autonomy also powers the terrestrial ExynPak product, which is being used in a collaborative proof-of-concept with Trimble on a fully autonomous ground-based robotic solution.
Monitoring progress on a construction site is a growing use case for the ExynAero products, and figures to continue on that track with this new EA6 flagship airframe, but there are plenty of other use cases as well. Elm reiterated that this is simply the start of a long-term journey, pointing to the early benefits of having “the first fully integrated, fully autonomous aerial robot,” with the “benefit of longer flight times and higher accuracy.” The company’s CEO also indicated that while mining is still the bread and butter for Exyn technology, “We're seeing a lot of other adjacent use cases we can grow into. For example, outdoor flights, looking at critical infrastructure. We're getting a lot of requests from, not just mining, but other industry verticals.”
Both of these companies were founded within the last decade – Easy Aerial’s founding came in 2014 – which is key for the aforementioned desire from Exyn for any partner to be able and willing to grow and evolve with the industry. Specifically, Exyn calls out the possibility of being able to “expand its offerings to include Easy Aerial’s drone-in-a-box solution, automated charging, and remote operations to further automate their autonomous robot.”
In a prepared press statement, Elm said, “In early 2021, we started evaluating US-made airframes for our next generation of aerial robotic platforms. We sought out to find a product partner that shared our mission and would be an active collaborator in building an ExynAI-specific robot to be used across the industry verticals we address. In our search, we found a compatible airframe in the Easy Aerial Osprey and an incredible team behind it that would jointly propel us forward."
Easy Aerial CEO Ido Gur added, “Exyn and Easy Aerial share a common vision of automating monitoring solutions. Many of our customers share the same operational needs of autonomous drone-based robotics to operate in the most demanding environments, so this partnership was a no-brainer. We’re ecstatic to be working alongside Exyn, supporting our enterprise and government customer base.”
