Visiting lecturer / aerial surveyor / landscape architect Peter Wilder demonstrated the Inspire 1 drone in the Stockwell Street crit pit; showing how it is able to provide stable indoor flight using its optical flow sensors.

The flight time of the Inspire 1 is dictated by its battery life of 20 minutes with larger surveys packaged into chunks of that time.  It can stream live video back to the base station at 4K resolution.

Other interesting applications of drone technology include firefighting – with thermal imaging showing the hottest part of the fire so this location can be transmitted to “smart” fire engines, and crop dusting with the drone indicating any gaps in coverage of the insecticide, fungicide etc.

Peter founded Survey Drone in 2014 to provide services for terrain modelling, aerial photography, thermal imaging of buildings, etc.