HAMPTON, Va., April 24, 2018 -- On the heels of its groundbreaking success with BNSF Railway in the achievement of truly automated long-range UAS supplemental track inspections, Bihrle Applied Research (Bihrle) announced today that it is spinning-off its computer vision and machine learning capabilities in a new venture called Ardenna (www.ardenna.com), which will offer solutions for the automated detection, classification and reporting of anomalies found during the inspection of critical infrastructure. While Ardenna will continue to offer the RailVision™ solution developed by Bihrle for BNSF, it will expand its intelligent automation solutions for critical infrastructure inspections into the Energy Sector, including power line, pipeline, solar and wind turbine.
"Given the current robust aerospace market, we continue to see a strong demand for our core aeronautical research and development capabilities," said Jack Ralston, President of Bihrle. "At the same time, we see the increasing use of drones to capture imagery for asset inspections and the growing realization that automation is needed to process this imagery, so the creation of Ardenna allows the new venture to focus specifically on this opportunity."
"Operations and Maintenance (O&M) organizations have begun looking to drones as a new tool for monitoring the health of their assets. While drones do represent a tremendous opportunity to improve human safety while providing new and alternative ways to visualize the health of an asset and establish predictive analytics capabilities, an unintended consequence is the tsunami of images being collected today," said David Patterson, Business Lead for Ardenna. "Ardenna solves the problem of having more images than humans can review by automating the detection, classification and reporting of anomalies, therefore providing the critical information needed by O&M organizations in near-real time. The compelling need for this capability was clearly demonstrated in BNSF's rail inspection application, so we are excited to bring this technology to other drone inspection use cases."
Bihrle will continue to offer its core aeronautical research & development capabilities in the areas of wind tunnel testing, flight dynamics, and simulation to the domestic and international aerospace markets. Bihrle will also continue to offer UAS engineering services in the areas of aircraft flight dynamics, sense-and-avoid technologies, BVLOS and regulatory consulting as well as software products for UAS flight planning and simulation.
More information is available at www.ardenna.com or visit us at Booth #2528 during AUVSI's XPONENTIAL event May 1-3 in Denver.
