Oxford-based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) startup Animal Dynamics has announced that it is acquiring Accelerated Dynamics (ADx), a UK startup developing an AI platform for drone fleet management.
Animal Dynamics will integrate the ADx operating platform with its existing projects, including Stork (last-mile delivery vehicle) and Skeeter (micro-UAVs). This software integration will support the rapid scale-up of Animal Dynamics to provide high-efficiency, coordinated solutions for a number of markets, including last-mile logistics, emergency response, agriculture, surveying, and defence markets.
Founded in 2016 by Mantas Gribulis, CEO, and Umar Javed Wani, CTO, Accelerated Dynamics has developed an operating platform that simplifies the management of multiple drones. The software enables operators to run an unlimited number of vehicle fleets with robust functionality to ensure collision avoidance and intelligent decision making via sensors and video feeds from all connected devices.
In fields such as emergency response, logistics, agriculture, surveying and defence, the ability to co-ordinate multiple drones will greatly increase the efficiency of deployments and expand capability. For example, in last-mile logistics co-ordinating data-driven autonomy and planning with connected vehicles will lead to collective learning that increases the speed and efficiency of deliveries, as well as making hard-to-reach areas more easily accessible. In agriculture, the software enables farmers to utilise UAVs for autonomous spraying and crop monitoring to increase yield, without specific training. For surveying, the software supports enables very large areas to be covered in short time frames using only a fraction of the resources of current solutions.
“We are delighted to be joining the Animal Dynamics team because they have developed some exciting hardware solutions based on the same premise as our work: super-efficiency for increased capability,” added Mantas Gribulis, CEO, Accelerated Dynamics. “We are really looking forward to working with the engineering team to test our existing platform for a number of use cases, requiring robust management solutions for complex fleet operations. It’s a great way to bring our software solution into the market.”
Animal Dynamics is developing bio-inspired UAVs, including Skeeter and Stork. Skeeter is a micro-UAV inspired by the flight of dragonflies and is designed to operate in high gust wind conditions with greater tolerance and endurance than existing quadcopter equivalents. Integrating the Accelerated Dynamics ADx Platform, Skeeter will be able to operate as a fleet of drones for applications such as survey inspections, defence and crop management for farms.
Stork, meanwhile, draws on studies of bird flight mechanics to enable the transport of larger payloads relative to vehicle size and weight at lower costs and over larger distances. The vehicle is able to take off and land with no infrastructure. With the ADx Platform, Stork will support sophisticated deployments of supplies and equipment in humanitarian aid, emergency response and extreme logistics scenarios.
“There are clear benefits to acquiring Accelerated Dynamics, because it enhances our ability to fly and manage multiple UAVs autonomously in a number of different scenarios,” said Alex Caccia, CEO and co-founder, Animal Dynamics. “There are significant opportunities for Stork and Skeeter in markets such as logistics, emergency response, defence and agriculture, where the ability to deploy fleets of autonomous drones will deliver significant efficiency and productivity gains over single use deployments. With a fully integrated hardware and software stack, we can speed up our time-to-market and have the flexibility to meet the diverse needs of customers for autonomous vehicles.”
