Concept: Israeli startup vHive has launched an end-to-end software solution that allows businesses to build digital twins of their field assets and operations with autonomous drone hives ranging from one to many drones. It allows businesses to use drones to collect data and use AI and computer vision algorithms to construct digital twins of their assets, such as cell towers, cranes, and structures.

Nature of Disruption: Organizations can organize their drone mission, deploy drones with a press of a button, and execute their survey fully autonomously while ensuring safety. It assists enterprise customers in digitizing assets and creating digital twins to visualize, analyze, simulate, and enhance assets and processes across time. vHive can process survey data and create digital twins of assets automatically. It uses vHive algorithms and an AI engine to analyze digital assets per business requirements. To reduce the time it takes to get business insights, data insights can be shared with peers via annotations and reports. As a result, businesses can monitor their field assets and activities continuously. For a variety of commercial drones, the vHive software automates flight planning and data processing. A single drone can survey the site in a fraction of the time it would take a human as claimed, and photogrammetry is used to convert 2D camera photos into a 3D reconstruction. The scale can be adjusted from a few centimeters to a millimeter, providing better resolution but increasing flying duration. This allows the telco to create an online portfolio of their telecom sites to optimize the record-keeping process.

Outlook: Users can leverage vHive’s global field operations network or allow their employees to use off-the-shelf drones and operate them with little or no training. The technology can enable airborne surveys of any scale or shape conceivable, quicker, cheaper, and easier, thanks to powerful multi-agent data collecting algorithms and mission dynamics AI. In comparison to other drone platforms, vHive’s software uses a data and analytics pipeline to convert a monolithic 3D model of a cell tower or crane into a semantically annotated digital twin that represents specific items, flaws, and other important occurrences. Wireless communication operators, construction businesses, and commercial insurance organizations, such as Deutsche Telekom, Bechtel, Phoenix Tower International, and SBA, are among the startup’s existing customers. Bechtel, an American engineering company, collaborated with vHive to create a workflow that allows a drone to inspect the crane in less than 20 minutes without having to lower it to the ground. The site inspectors were able to assess the 3D model from their office, which decreased downtime. In April 2022, the startup raised $25M in Series B funding led by PSG to expand its drone-driven digital twins to new industries and accelerate its growth.

This article was originally published in Verdict.co.uk