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Skyports Drone Services Part of New Trial “to Discover if Drones Can Help Improve Water Quality in UK”

Sky­ports Drone Ser­vices announced this week that its craft are being deployed to improve water qual­i­ty mon­i­tor­ing in UK coastal waters and estu­ar­ies, reports a press release. This is part of a col­lab­o­ra­tive tri­al involv­ing Northum­bri­an Water, Maku­tu and RS Hydro.

Called ‘Project King­fish­er’, this is the world’s first drone tri­al for the water indus­try.  It has already entered a sec­ond phase to explore the use of autonomous tech­nolo­gies and prove that uncrewed aer­i­al vehi­cles (UAV) can sup­port water data col­lec­tion and mon­i­tor­ing.

The release explains, “Fol­low­ing ini­tial test flights in Bish­op Auck­land, Coun­ty Durham, ear­li­er this year, this next phase expands across the North East of Eng­land. The tri­als will show­case how drone oper­a­tions can help water com­pa­nies respond more effec­tive­ly to issues, improve work­er safe­ty and stream­line the col­lec­tion of water qual­i­ty data from hard-to-reach areas.”

At present, Northum­bri­an Water relies on staff to man­u­al­ly col­lect sam­ples, which can be time-con­sum­ing and inef­fi­cient. In some of the most remote loca­tions, the trav­el to test­ing sites can take sev­er­al hours.

Sky­ports is lead­ing the flights using its all-elec­tric Speed­bird Aero mul­ti-rotor craft, capa­ble of cov­er­ing dis­tances of up to 20 km on a sin­gle bat­tery charge. The release con­tin­ues, “The UAV is equipped with var­i­ous sen­sors that are low­ered by a winch into des­ig­nat­ed sam­ple points to mea­sure mul­ti­ple water qual­i­ty para­me­ters in situ. The col­lect­ed data is trans­mit­ted in real-time to Northum­bri­an Water as a live data feed.” Named after the way these drones can hov­er and swoop down like a king­fish­er, the Project is show­ing promis­ing results.

Mem­bers of the Project King­fish­er team with one of its drones (Cred­it: Sky­ports)

Ches­ka P. Rojas, the Project King­fish­er Lead at Sky­ports, com­ment­ed, “Water qual­i­ty mon­i­tor­ing is a real­ly com­pelling drone inspec­tion use case, which we’re excit­ed to be devel­op­ing through the Project. The lat­est phase of tri­als build on infor­ma­tion gath­ered ear­li­er in the year and is an impor­tant step towards scal­ing these ser­vices and even­tu­al­ly rolling them out in oth­er parts of the UK.” Adding, “The work we’re doing here aims to bring tan­gi­ble improve­ments to UK water envi­ron­ments and the com­mu­ni­ties that use them.”

John Edwards, Tech­ni­cal Pol­i­cy Man­ag­er at Northum­bri­an Water, remarked, “The work we have con­duct­ed over the past month has been incred­i­bly valu­able for us and helped us to under­stand the true ben­e­fits and oppor­tu­ni­ties this could unlock for the entire water indus­try in the future.”

He con­tin­ued, “Water qual­i­ty is an incred­i­bly impor­tant top­ic at the moment,  so it’s great that we are able to use these inno­v­a­tive tri­als to see how our region­al coasts and rivers are mon­i­tored by pro­vid­ing valu­able data.”

James Sum­sion, CEO of Maku­tu, added, “Find­ing inno­v­a­tive, low cost, envi­ron­men­tal­ly sound and repeat­able ways to obtain and analyse valu­able water qual­i­ty data is key to pro­tect­ing and improv­ing the envi­ron­ment in which we live.  We are very pleased as to how these tri­als have pro­gressed and look for­ward to sig­nif­i­cant­ly build­ing out this capa­bil­i­ty with­in the next phase of the pro­gram.”

For more infor­ma­tion

https://skyportsdroneservices.com/

(Top image: Sky­ports Drone Ser­vices)

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