Drones are Coming to Providence
Thursday, June 19, 2014
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…a drone in Providence?
“I like flying things,” Xact Maps founder and drone pioneer Andy Trench says with a smile. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to fly things for a long time.”
Trench and his wife Kyla are 2 of the biggest names in the drone industry. They were featured at this month’s Providence Geeks meeting, explaining how their cutting edge Xact Maps startup is revolutionizing the way data can be gathered and video can be shot.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST“We can get to places people have never been to before with a camera,” Trench says of his flying drones. The drones can be controlled from a remote or from Trench’s laptop, and have no physical flight limitations.
Trench designs his drones from scratch, and they come in all different sizes. The smallest drone, the Quadricopter, fits in the palm of a hand. The largest, the Opticopter, stands over 10 feet tall.
Trench is making huge strides in the world of spatial data gathering. While humans are slow and have unavoidable “human error” in data gathering, the Xact Maps drones can analyze 700,000 data points per second and gather a gigabyte of data per minute.
“Every day I get a call or an email saying ‘I’m getting tired of sending my team out to do something that you can seemingly do in minutes,’” Trench said.
The drone industry is new and unfamiliar, so the future of Trench’s company could go in any number of directions. Trench said he is planning on using the drones to film an upcoming reality TV show, and by and large he’ll do things he’s interested in over going for a big money-grab.
“What can we do with spatial data?” Trench wonders. “There’s an immense amount of innovation left in this field.”
Video demonstrations of the Xact Maps drones are available at this link. More information on Providence Geeks can be found on Facebook.
Related Articles
- Could a RIer be killed by a drone?
- RI Bill Seeks to Regulate Use of Drone Technology
- Brown University As Seen From A Drone
- Seeing Jamestown from a Drone
