Astron’s Geospatial Team (Top L-R) Joshua Kelcey, Will Wishart, Mehdi Ravanbakhsh, Sam Atkinson, Steven Tsang, Stuart Paisley (Bottom L-R) Tore Pedersen and Carl Dyde. (Absent from photo: Damien O’Grady and William An)
Astron Environmental Services took possession of Western Australia’s first BRAMOR rTK Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) (also known as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)) last week, which is the second UAS of its kind to be operating in Australia.
The BRAMOR rTK is a commercial grade UAS developed in Slovenia by aerospace enterprise and solution provider C-ASTRAL Aerospace Ltd.
The system is ideally suited to surveying and remote sensing applications that need industry leading precision and large spatial area coverage.
C-ASTRAL is one of Europe’s market leaders in the development of small commercial fixed wing UAS/UAV and boasts a global presence, a robust research and development program and advanced sensor integration capabilities.
Will Wishart, Managing Director of Astron said, "We are absolutely thrilled to have received our first UAS from C-ASTRAL.”
“There is a big opportunity in our space to use technology such as UAVs to complement traditional survey or monitoring approaches so we can make more informed decisions about the management of the environment.”
“We see a myriad of environmental applications, offering extremely valuable data, on demand, and for a relatively low cost.”
Astron alongside local partner Arvista has been successfully using smaller UAS predominantly for mine surveying and environmental surveying for a number of years.
”To date we have been predominantly using the Sensefly Ebee UAS for our applications here in Western Australia. The Ebee is a great platform, however the BRAMOR rTK gives us significantly more flight endurance, a more accurate dataset and the ability to operate in less favourable weather than the Ebee,” says Mr Wishart.
With the addition of the BRAMOR rTK system, Astron can now provide clients with some of the highest quality photogrammetric mapping, orthophotography and related services currently available in Australia.
"We have absolutely no doubt that the data we will acquire for clients using the BRAMOR rTK, together with the processing and delivery of actionable information is going to revolutionise many aspects of environmental management,” Mr Wishart said.