Voltair
Autonomous Drones for Earth Observation
About the Company
We build drones with unlimited range (by recharging on power lines). The grid is the world’s largest machine. Thus, we can collect data anywhere, anytime. We're selling a full-stack inspection service to power utilities by delivering reports with annotated photos of equipment that is broken or at risk. Our mission is to find faults and other maintenance concerns before they spark wildfires. Today power utilities are our customer, but tomorrow they'll be our deployment partner. At scale we are a new infrastructure layer for data on the physical world.
Tech Stack
Our drones recharge inductively from power lines by harvesting the magnetic field with a current transformer. We build custom drones with COTS parts. We collect visual and thermal data. Soon we'll fly our drones BVLOS over LTE, but today our field technicians collect data on-site. We run this data through a MV pipelines and then deliver the GIS and PDF reports to our customers.
Our Hardest Challenges
- Performant recharging on distribution lines
- Drone weather hardening & reliability
- Tele-operations & autonomy
- Mission planning with (1) range / recharge locations (stochastic!) (2) weather (3) FAA and other compliance constraints + traveling inspector problem
- Cost effective uplink & data management / MV on the edge
Founders
Hayden is the co-founder and CTO of Voltair. He studied electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington, where he focused on power electronics. He spent two years doing system protection engineering at Seattle City Light and later worked in R&D at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL).
Open Positions at Voltair (2 Jobs)
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