eBumper4 Obstacle Avoidance For Drones - New Product Introduced by Panoptes Systems

If the fear of your banging into obstacles is the biggest problem you have while flying it, the best solution for you is here!

Panoptes Systems has recently launched the eBumper4, their first sonar-based drone obstacle avoidance system. Small drones will no more be able to blindly bang into surfaces and damage their expensive technology and body.

eBumper4’ s is equipped with 4 sonar sensors that allow the drone to gather data about its surroundings, whether it is to the front, on the right or left and even above it. When the obstacle avoidance system senses a barrier in its path, it averts the drone from crashing into it or getting to close. Due to this “bump” off from the object, the flier can then steer the drone towards safely.

eBumper4 is works great when flying at around 8 ft/sec (2.5 m/sec) and can be considered a great candidate for permitting safer and more effective commercial drone activities for industrial inspection and cinematography.

“Robust integration of the eBumper4 sonar sensors required a significant development and testing effort to understand the very noisy environment of a quadcopter,” says Panoptes CTO Fabrice Kunzi talking about their newest product. “Our solution ultimately combined a mix of precise sensor placement and triggering, clever filtering, as well as smart physical integration.”

For the time being, the eBumper4 is only available for use with the Phantom 2 range of drones from DJI and 3D Robotics’ Iris+ drone, but it is planed for production for other company’s drones as well.

Already on Kickstarter, while the project has not reached its goal of $80,000 by April 11, the team is still working on the innovation and more details can be found on their official website.

“Much of the commercial drone innovation revolution is being led by start-ups and passionate individual entrepreneurs,” said Weigel. “We’ve chosen to launch our eBumper4 order campaign on Kickstarter as a way to share our story with this vibrant group, engage prospective eBumper4 users, and build the community of people who will use eBumper4 to do some amazing things we haven’t even thought of yet.”

Panoptes will also be launching a Software Development Kit for their new product, which will let users create custom eBumper4 apps designed for their own particular requirements.