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Spotr employing revolutionary new technique to capture aerial images

April 1, 2022

Spotr realized an important next step in their journey towards sustainably mapping and managing all houses in the world. Spotr's new light-weight aerial sensing technology takes building inspection to the next level.


Dirk Huibers, CEO at Spotr: "Of course at Spotr, we have the ambition to inspect every building in the world. But last year we encountered a big problem. We miss about 10% of the images we want to capture from roofs or rear façades. Traditional methods like drones or inspectors don't do the job, because they're very time consuming and expensive."


Rob Wijnhoven, R&D Lead at Spotr, explains more about the innovation process the company went throught in the past year: "We've researched state of the art technologies in the field of drones and cameras and managed to combine everything in a small, lightweight box. We use kinetic energy of organic UAV's to power this box."


"Basically", Wijnhoven continues, "our breakthrough insight is the use of magnetic fields to navigate from our office to buildings in the field."

"Our breakthrough insight is the use of magnetic fields to navigate from our office to buildings in the field."


Spotr is proud to present: Project Pigeon. Pigeons are known for their great sense of direction. They have a built-in day- and night rhythm and are able to navigate their way around, based on the sun's position. Pigeons have a great track record when it comes to successfully navigating large areas.


Spotr will be training pigeons to map the entirety of The Netherlands and the rest of Europe. Rob Wijnhoven: "The results of this project are impressive: we obtain 5 times higher image quality than the best available commercial drones. It's 42 times cheaper and 968 times faster to deploy."


The pigeon footage will be used to enrich image sources on the Spotr platform. It will go live on the first of April, 2022 and Spotr expects to cover every major city of Europe in the next 12 months.


Curious to see the first aerial footage from Spotr's Project Pigeon? Click here.