George Mathew Archives - International Mining

Kespry and DroneBase have announced a partnership that, they say, enables insurance, mining, and aggregates enterprises across North America to expand aerial analytics implementation across their work sites.

Kespry’s customers will now be able to leverage DroneBase’s service offering to manage their Kespry deployments as part of Kespry’s new Bring Your Own Drone (BYOD) program, Kespry said. BYOD includes a new platform pricing model designed to meet the expanding enterprise aerial intelligence requirements of multi-site mining and aggregates companies, as well as large-scale residential and commercial property insurers, it explained.

“The combination of Kespry and DroneBase brings the best of the platform and services worlds together, offering a cost-effective, productive way of using drone-based analytics across the largest insurance, mining, and aggregates businesses,” Kespry said.

George Mathew, CEO, Kespry, said: “The combination of Kespry and DroneBase delivers serious value to companies across North America looking for a partner to help scale their usage of Kespry’s aerial intelligence platform and benefit from its granularly-accurate inspection, inventory management and mine planning capabilities.”

Dan Burton, Founder and CEO of DroneBase, said: “With our global pilot network in all 50 states and over 70 countries, DroneBase will enable Kespry clients to scale their drone programs across North America without the cost of investing in hardware. By combining our strengths, DroneBase and Kespry will solve a need within these industries.”

Kespry’s BYOD program gives companies flexibility in how they source their aerial data, the company says, whether customers use Kespry-sourced drone hardware, DroneBase, or their own existing DJI drone fleet, including the DJI Mavic 2 Pro and the DJI Phantom series.

DroneBase, the largest global drone operations company, according to Kespry, can either manage customers’ Kespry deployments or have DroneBase’s global pilot network fly their missions, which can be turned around in 48-72 hours, according to the company. “Kespry now offers a single fee for its platform, including unlimited access to industry-leading, vertically-integrated applications, the Kespry Cloud and AI and ML-based analytics,” it said.

Kespry’s aerial intelligence platform is now deployed at 220 mining and aggregates customers that use its platform across 3,311 worksites across North America, with 22,987 missions in 2018 alone, it said. These companies typically use Kespry for inventory management, mine planning, materials management, contractor benchmarking, and boosting employee safety.

Kespry and DJI are pooling resources to offer the DJI Mavic 2 Pro drone as part of the Kespry stockpile measurement solution for mining and aggregates companies.

“This solution delivers the unique Kespry autonomous flight and aerial intelligence experience for stockpile measurement using a DJI drone,” according to Kespry.

“Adding this affordable, powerful and portable solution will enable large aggregates and mining companies to standardise and capture stockpile data across all their sites in the Kespry platform, while continuing to use the high-accuracy Kespry 2 drones to support mine and site planning operations.”

Integration of data captured from a DJI drone is the next innovation in the development of the Kespry industrial sensor platform, according to the company.

To date, Kespry has built a customer base of more than 200 mining and aggregates companies by providing drones for more accurate, easier to use, and safer ways to provide inventory management and mine planning data.

“As these customers scale their use of drone data, they are looking to standardise on a single platform to organise and analyse that data across sites, geographies, and product divisions – even when those sites are highly distributed,” Kespry says.

The addition of the DJI Mavic 2 Pro to the Kespry lineup is designed to enable even more site data to be centralised in the Kespry cloud.

George Mathew, CEO and Chairman of Kespry, said: “Drone data is now the standard approach for measuring stockpiles at mine sites, however, millions of dollars are wasted through reconciling inconsistent data from different platforms and the time involved getting that data ready for analysis.”

“Our goal with the addition of the Mavic 2 Pro to our solution is to respond to our customers wishing to use the Kespry aerial intelligence platform across all mine sites to standardise how stockpile data is generated – lowering their costs and helping drive the profitability of every site.”

Jan Gasparic, Director of Strategic Partnerships at DJI, said: “Pairing the Mavic 2 Pro with Kespry’s industry-leading AI, ML, and analytics capabilities will be of enormous benefit to mining companies that are looking to take advantage of drone technology in a portable and powerful package.”

The integration of DJI’s drone and sensors into the Kespry platform is the latest innovation in the delivery of an industrial sensor network, closely following Kespry’s recently-announced high-resolution thermal capabilities for industrial inspection.

The Kespry platform is now capable of processing and analysing a wide range of sensor data, enabling the future creation of industry-specific applications, including those under current development with leaders in the energy sector.

Kespry is offering the Mavic 2 Pro as part of its fully-managed, end-to-end annual subscription model. Kespry customers that choose the Mavic 2 Pro for stockpile measurement will benefit from the full Kespry experience, including its support, training, customer success team, and drone up-time guarantee.

The Kespry stockpile measurement solution with DJI will be available in the first quarter of next year.

Kespry and DroneBase combine expertise for improved drone-based analytics

Drone specialists Kespry and DJI combine forces to improve stockpile monitoring