Skip to main content

Aerotain’s blimp-inspired Skye drone won’t injure people if it crash lands

Drone technology is progressing at a rapid rate, but at least one company is looking to the past for innovation in the future. To address the perplexing issue of how to protect people and property from drones that get out of control and fall to the ground, Swiss company Aerotain is seeking inspiration from blimps, creating a modern drone using an inflated balloon.

When flying under the control of an experienced operator, a remote-controlled drone provides a unique angle to any event, whether it be a family backyard barbecue or a major public event. Drones can be beneficial, but their location in the sky also makes them inherently dangerous, especially if their flight is disrupted and they come crashing to the ground. Companies have been developing a variety of solutions to protect people from falling drones. These ideas include auto-hovering features that stabilize a falling drone and even a mini-parachute that slows a drone during a fall. Not to be outdone, Aerotain’s inflatable drone concept is among the most unique ideas being proposed for the safe operations of a drone in a crowded public area.

The company’s Skye drone is comprised of an inflatable balloon that is filled with helium to help the device stay aloft. This assisted lift makes it possible for the drone to fly for more than two hours, eclipsing most modern drones which have significantly shorter flight times.

The Skye is highly customizable and can be inflated to different sizes, with the largest version measuring 3 meters in diameter. This supersized, blimp-style drone is eye-catching, making it perfect for companies that want to advertise their brand on the sides of the UAV. The Skye also can carry up to 4 pounds of broadcast-quality camera equipment that can be used to stream photos and videos to a remote operator.

Because it is a balloon, the Skye drone is a soft platform that will cause only minor injury if an error in its flight causes it to collide with people who are on they ground. It also is safe to touch since its propulsion system is enclosed within the unit. This design provides a significant advantage over existing quadcopters that are made of a hard plastic and have external blades capable of inflicting damage on people and animals when they accidentally collide.

Aerotain is marketing its drone to event organizers looking for a safe alternative to conventional drones for aerial photography. The company believes its technology is perfect for large gatherings such as concerts and sporting events where the Skye drone’s safety features are paramount and its presence will attract attention for a brand. A smaller version of the Skye drone also can be used in compact public spaces, such as the interior of a building, where the potential for a collision with people and objects is high. Aerotain is heavily promoting its solution, recently demoing its Skye drone at the NAB Show in Las Vegas.

Editors' Recommendations

Kelly Hodgkins
Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more