We’re excited to announce that thermal imagery analysis is now available through DroneBase Insights with our drone roof report technology.
This new offering combines two major milestones of DroneBase. First, FLIR Systems’ strategic investment enabled us to partner with FLIR’s Infrared Training Center (ITC) to offer thermography training courses for drone pilots to build an exclusive thermal pilot network, which is making thermal imaging scalable across the country.
Second, DroneBase recently purchased Betterview’s aerial roof inspection capabilities, which helps insurers and property managers assess damage and mitigate risk for commercial properties, and is now part of the DroneBase Insights platform.
We’ve heard from many of our partners that scalable, affordable thermal imagery would be helpful for a variety of insurance and property management use cases. Thermal imagery provides insights into damage that isn’t visible to the naked eye, getting into the membrane of roofs and detecting everything from water leaks to cracks or even damage to HVAC units. Catching these issues immediately is critical for underwriting or enabling property managers to make minor repairs, rather than replacing an entire roof.
We believe that specialty imaging, such as thermal, will be key to the future of the drone industry. However, up until this point, it has been too expensive to acquire on a scalable, affordable basis. That’s why we have been working with FLIR’s ITC to provide a four-day sUAS Level 1 Thermography Certification training. DroneBase pilots receive a special discount to learn how to perform aerial infrared inspections and its various applications, which qualifies them for exclusive DroneBase Thermal Missions.
A few months ago, we announced our first segue into reporting capabilities with DroneBase Insights Roof Reports, providing actionable data with drone imagery. Our roof reports aim to help property managers and insurers with an end-to-end aerial property inspection solution that is safe, fast, ROI-positive, and FAA-compliant. Using drones for inspections helps lower operating costs and shorten inspection times; however, we’re not stopping at RGB image (standard color photo) capture.
By analyzing thermal imagery, DroneBase will now be the first company able to provide scalable and reliable analysis of this kind. Using FLIR Tools, which converts raw thermal data into colored radiometric imagery, we can integrate this invaluable information into our reports, providing a new level of understanding and discernment. We’re also working on building artificial intelligence into DroneBase Insights in order to get results and actionable data to our partners even faster. Today, that happens within a few days, but we’re building towards a future where insights will be gleaned instantly.
We’re working on building the drone services company of the future and will continue to develop beneficial opportunities for both our pilots and our customers.