Drone manufacturing in Kenai is moving towards a reality.
CEO John Parker of Integrated Robotics said the parent company of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles that he uses has shown increased interest in Alaska’s drone market.
Parker: “ECA Robotics, they’re the oldest robotics company in the world they were formed in 1936 and they have worldwide coverage in over 300 robotics products, of which the IT180 is one. And ECA recognizes the value of doing the manufacturing in the U.S. for the U.S. market, they’re just gaining traction in the U.S. market.”
Currently the IT180 is manufactured in France and he said some testing and evaluation of manufacturing locally will be done within the next month.
Parker added that since a video of amazon dropping a package on someone’s front porch went viral it’s been difficult changing perceptions of drones from that of “invasive and spies” to “helpful”.
UAVs were used in last year’s Funny River Fire to find hot spots at night.
Parker: “And it was flown at night and the infrared camera can see through the smoke and it can find hot spots and they plotted those. It uses GPS coordinations as well, so they find a hot spot, they coordinate it, that data is transmitted back to the ground station and then it was plotted on a map and given to the Incident Commander. Every morning they had a meeting at 7 o’clock prior to going out and resuming fire suppression, so they had this data each night for where these hot spots where, so they could marshal their resources and move them quicker and more effectively into the fire, and it’s why we didn’t have a real problem with this fire, and it was a huge fire.”