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TECHNOLOGY LICENSING OPPORTUNITY Route-Operable Unmanned Navigation of Drones (ROUNDS) A cost-effective way for drones to follow a course inside a building or at other locations where GPS signals are ... TECHNOLOGY LICENSING OPPORTUNITY Route-Operable Unmanned Navigation of Drones (ROUNDS) A cost-effective way for drones to follow a course inside a building or at other locations where GPS signals are absent. Opportunity: Idaho National Laboratory (INL), managed and operated by Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC (BEA), is offering the opportunity to enter into a license and/or collaborative research agreement to commercialize ROUNDS. Overview: The use of drones to offset human activities or improve performance has been applied to multiple industries such as logistics, entertainment, military, and automotive. Recently, drones have become of interest to the nuclear power industry because they can automate activities in a plant as well as improve performance of the activities. Given the cost of conducting manual data collection, such as in operator rounds and inspections, industries tend to resort to retrofitting plant equipment with digital technologies as a separate layer of instrumentation on top of the analog instrumentation in the plant. ROUNDS uses a drone to collect multiple measurements in one round. ROUNDS enables the drone to maintain self-awareness of its location by using visual features (represented by QR codes) as visual reference. Description: Route Operable Unmanned Navigation of Drones (ROUNDS) enables any drone with a camera to determine its location with high accuracy and move rapidly, yet accurately, along a path. ROUNDS is a combination of methods developed into a software algorithm to make it possible for the drone to follow a trajectory that is dynamically tracked through continuous updates of the drone’s location and adjustment to its movement. ROUNDS exploits the imaging and communication capabilities of readily available commercial drones. The technology uses the drone’s standard camera to capture images of QR codes strategically placed in fixed locations throughout the drone’s operating environment. These codes contain identifying information about the QR code location as well as other data. Once the QR code is identified and its location is determined, ROUNDS uses the QR code view to determine the drone’s relative location to the QR code with an accuracy of few inches. This relative location is used to guide the drone navigation. Benefits: Reduces cost compared to manual data collection. Increases safety compared to manual data collection in harsh environments. Fast processing power, allowing the drone to travel quickly, therefore covering long routes on the drone limited battery. Applications: Power plant operators Security Safety Radiation surveys Warehouse surveys Other plant operators Development Status: TRL 4. The system has been validated in a laboratory environment. IP Status: Provisional Patent Application No. 63/090,645, “Route-Operable Unmanned Navigation of Drones (ROUNDS),” BEA Docket No. BA-1249. Additional Information Video Demonstration available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3QfEdV_YGo INL is seeking to license the above intellectual property to a company with a demonstrated ability to bring such inventions to the market. Exclusive rights in defined fields of use may be available. Please visit Technology Deployment’s website at https://inl.gov/inl-initiatives/technology-deployment for more information on working with INL and the industrial partnering and technology transfer process. Companies interested in learning more about this licensing opportunity should contact Andrew Rankin at td@inl.gov.