48 Orthodrone is developing a multicopter technology it calls Pivot, which embodies the radical concept of stabilising the entire fuselage while the propulsion system moves around it to compensate for wind coming from any direction. The purpose of this departure from convention is to exploit the speed of response available when the rotors have far less mass to move around any axis when the fuselage is effectively decoupled from them in pitch and roll. The result is a platform stable enough to make the most of the helicopter-grade sensors it can carry. Antarctic mishap The idea was born of a mishap suffered by the brand-new data acquisition business during a surveying trip to Antarctica in 2019, according to CEO Juri Klusak, who started Orthodrone straight out of Kiel University with friend and fellow geospatial data scientist Julian Teege, now Orthodrone’s COO. All the way down south, the €60,000 (£45,000) industrial-grade multicopter they bought from a reputable manufacturer failed due to a temperature related fault in its flight controller. “I was standing in front of the Belgian Antarctic research station and I had this big drone with €250,000 worth of sensor equipment. Everyone was excited to see it flying – and it fell out of the sky,” he recalls. “I had a backup, a smaller drone, and I got enough data for the project, but it was not what I wanted for the company.” Scientists turn UAS developers Klusak studied environmental geography and management at university, working with consumer drones for data acquisition, modelling coastlines, gauging the risk of erosion and mapping sea grass, presenting his thesis at the European Geoscience Union (EGU) in 2018. “I showcased my bachelor’s thesis and my data sets, and I realised then that within the science community there was a massive need for that kind of data and there was a huge knowledge gap in how to achieve quality data, how to manage it and how to analyse it.” Upon returning to Germany, Klusak consulted a few friends and former classmates, including Teege, and together they realised there was a Peter Donaldson investigates a multicopter sturdy enough to endure harsh environments – the idea was born in Antartica after all New take on stability October/November 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology A key target market for Orthodrone’s Pivot technology is supporting offshore operations of all kinds, which drove it to pursue harsh environment capabilities (Images courtesy of Orthodrone unless otherwise stated)
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