Near Lab (CEO Jaehyuk Choi), an AI autonomous flight drone startup, will participate in CES 2024, which opened in Las Vegas, USA on the 9th (local time), and unveil its independently developed multi-purpose small autonomous drone ‘AIDrone’ (tentative name) for the first time.
AIDrone is a compound word of AI autonomous flight and drone, and is a name given in the sense that it is a drone that provides aid to people.
AIDrone is equipped with a laser range finder (LRF) along with a 2-axis gimbal optical/infrared (EO/IR) camera capable of rotating up to 200 degrees, enabling day and night missions. It is light at 2 kg and is convenient to carry, making it ideal for close-range reconnaissance. The attitude control technology that responds to strong winds developed during wind turbine safety inspections is also incorporated into AIDrone. It can perform its mission even in environments with strong winds with a maximum wind speed of 12 m/s, and shows stable performance not only in indoor or underground environments where it is difficult to detect GPS signals through vision AI, but also in urban areas with severe GPS disturbance.
Near Lab stated that AIDrone can perform close-range reconnaissance or guard missions in the defense field, and can quickly inspect fire or security sites in the social safety field and help resolve emergency situations.
Nears Lab participated in this CES with support from the Credit Guarantee Fund. Among the startups attending the Integrated Korea Pavilion, 15 companies were selected and plan to attend the ‘K-Innovation Day’ event. At this event, there will be an opportunity to pitch to large companies such as Walmart and IBM, and they will also play an active role on the global startup stage.
Meanwhile, in 2022, it won the CES Innovation Award in the ‘Software & Mobile App’ category for its smartphone app ‘NearthWIND Mobile’, which allows small commercial drones to be used as autonomous flying drones.
Jaehyuk Choi, CEO of Nears Lab, said, “AIDrone is a multi-purpose drone that we produced ourselves to 100% implement Nears Lab’s AI autonomous flight technology accumulated in various environments since 2017.” He added, “AIDrone developed with domestic technology will be displayed on the big stage of CES. “We will demonstrate its usefulness and innovation,” he emphasized.