Tethered Drone Systems Joins IM

Tethered Drone Systems (TDS) is very pleased to have been invited to join the Innovation Martlesham. TDS has been introduced to the IM team by the British Robotics Seed Fund who have invested in this start up business as part of their investment strategy in seeking out innovative robotics and autonomous technologies.

TDS has developed this technology in collaboration with Southampton and Bath Universities and continues the academic engagement on many aspects of the platform.   The tethered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) delivered significantly improved flight duration – 24 hours or more compared to the free flying drones that can only manage 45 minutes flying and in favourable flying conditions.  UAV telemetry up the powered tether and secure data or video feed back down the tether are benefits that many organisations are seeking as free flying drone are vulnerable to the RF signal being jammed and or intercepted.

TDS have a strong, very light and high voltage rated tether which allows continuous flight at 120m (400 feet) as licensed by the CAA, and in higher wind speeds than any free flying drone, up to 30 mph.  Flight is autonomous allowing the drone to carry various client payloads and present the data from the payload in a secure manner for analysis or onward transmission.  The secure data is carried by the tether by power line communication (PLC) technology at ethernet bandwidth speeds and in real time.

The tethered drone technology can be used by military, security, blue light services, search and rescue, communications, broadcasters, agriculture, plant or wind farm inspection both on and off shore and many other applications.

TDS is in a final development and commercialisation phase and will launch the solution at the Farnborough Air Show in the summer of 2018 with initial sales in the UK but quickly moving into markets worldwide that have already expressed interest in the TDS technology.

Jim Gibson founder of TDS said that, “The tethered drone, although complex engineering that creates significant barriers to entry for potential competitors it is in fact the payload and the outputs delivered to the client that are the most important components of the solution”.