Mar 17, 2022

(Source: FOiA Drone) FOiA Drone, a Shanghai-based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) automatic inspection system developer, announced on Thursday it has obtained tens of millions of yuan in an A2 round of financing, according to 36Kr . The funds were continuously invested by ZHJ Group, while Chao Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor. Proceeds from this round will be mainly used for the R&D of a fully automatic flight system and the “Desktop as a Service” (DaaS) operation platform. Previously, the company received investment from ZHJ Group, Envision Capital, Turing Ventures, Y.H. Founded in 2017, FOiA Drone provides software and hardware systems and services for industrial UAVs, and serves patrol and inspection scenarios across fields including power grids, transportation, emergency, security and water supplies. It focuses on the R&D of automatic flight algorithms, in-depth scenario data precipitation and DaaS operation platform construction. In 2018, FOiA Drone first proposed the Industrial UAV 2.0 concept, which aimed to replace the pilot control and realize the full automatic operation of UAV system. Based on that, it developed a fully automatic UAV flight system. The system consists of four modules, including automatic airport, automatic flight algorithms, an intelligent analysis platform and a cloud platform. The automatic airport can realize the automatic operation of 24-hour work, while the automatic airport and UAVs can improve the response speed when an event occurs. In terms of automatic flight algorithms, FOiA Drone can realize autonomous patrol of UAVs according to its self-developed algorithms, realizing accurate positioning and tracking shooting of patrol inspection targets. In other words, it can realize real-time perception and automatic positioning through AI algorithm. It completes “automated driving” without pilots while finishing the flight routes and filming tasks. So far, the firm has accumulated 1.5 million working hours for the system and amassed 150,000 flight hours. FOiA Drone has served more than 10 patrol inspection scenes in transportation, power grids, wind turbine, water supplies, emergency services and other industries. Taking transportation as an example, the firm’s UAVs can complete tasks such as discovering abnormal road conditions and capturing illegal vehicle behavior during patrol.