>> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We are here in Denver, Colorado at the DJI AirWorks show, it's their second show; about 600 people talking about commercial applications for the DJI drone platform. Really exciting agriculture, construction, public safety, no fun stuff, well, it's all kind of fun, really about the commercial applications, and we're excited to have Chris Boots with us, he is the chief engineer of Quadrocopter. Chris, good to see you. >> Good to see you. >> So we talked a little bit about what Quadrocopter does, and you're really into the enterprise space, these are not platforms that are generally available, you've got to get them through a dealer, they're expensive, they're complicated pieces of equipment, and that's a place you guys have been playing for a long time. >> Absolutely. For example, the Wind Series was unveiled today, the 4 and the 8; AirWorks 2016 introduced the Wind 1 and 2, and what these are, are basically universal platforms that allow customers to put various different, whether it be gimbals or sensors, it's kind of just a blank slate DJI product. That way you're not constrained to the limitations of an M200 or an Aspire or anything like that. When Quadrocopter began almost a decade ago, we prided ourselves on delivering custom-tailored systems to various different customer needs, so we felt right at home when DJI unveiled the Wind series. >> So really what you mean is it's kind of stripped down to its bare bones components so that you can design it at whatever payloads you want for the specific application, and they're also big, heavy lifters, right? We saw the agricultural one, I think it holds like two and a half gallons, 22 pounds of liquid, so these are also heavy lift machines, these are not little Mavics or Sparks. >> Yeah, precisely, yeah. If you need to lift something lightweight, there's the Wind 1. If you need to lift something extremely heavy, there's the Wind 4 and the Wind 8 which can lift well over 20 to 25 pounds of payload, so you're lifting some big stuff with this. >> So when you talk to enterprise customers, and kind of their journey into getting into and using a drone platform for their business process, how do they get started, you know, what do you see as kind of their first steps where people have some success and then you know, build into more of a fleet if you will, integrate it more to their processes? How do most companies get started? Do they say yeah this looks like a cool platform, how do we use it? >> That's kind of exactly how it happens. It just all starts with an idea. Most of our customers if they're not already existing UAS corporations and companies, they can be just somebody like you or I that comes up with an interesting UAV solution and you know, they do some Google searching, they do some research, they find something like this doesn't exist. Where do I go from here? So it doesn't take them very long to start making phone calls, and more often than not they call us at Quadrocopter, and one of my pet peeves is I don't like saying no to a customer when they have an idea, so that basically takes their idea, it takes our resources whether it be DJI or third party integrations, and making their dream a reality, so it's not always cinematography and cameras, it can be sensors or you name it, so yeah! >> So what are some of the more innovative uses that you've seen people use the DJI platform for that you would have never thought of, most people on the street would never have an idea that this is a useful application for this platform? >> Sure, well, I'll talk a little bit about the latest Wind application that we designed this year. We utilized the larger of the four copters, the Wind 8, which is an octocopter, and the client had the idea of inspecting methane pipelines. Now these pipelines need to be inspected every six months per governmental regulation. Currently, the only way that most companies like BP and other gas industries are doing this is by foot, by ATV, with handheld sensors, or on a large scale with rotorcraft like helicopters and people hanging off the sides of them, again with handheld devices. >> And what, they've got specialty sensors that they're looking for leaks and this and that, it's not really visual inspection I take it, or is it both probably? >> A lot of times they use either a laser-based or a thermal-based handheld sensor, so like a flare thermal camera. In our case, we didn't want to be constrained to the environmental influences that thermal can sometimes have, whether it's cold or it's dark or bright out, it can really skew the results, so in our case, it was our goal to find something that isn't influenced by the external environments. So we officially landed on a laser-based methane detector and paired that with the Wind 8, which then flies the pipeline route in 10 to 20 foot segments, comes back, and that data is used in mapping software to find out what the results were along that pipeline. If it is found that something is leaking, that file that is pulled off the aircraft will say exactly where it was, how concentrated it was at that exact point, at which point somebody can on the ground inspect that further. It totally gets rid of the whole safety issue of somebody on the ground or in the air and the expensive part of man power, of walking a pipeline. We can do it more efficiently, we can do it way more safer, and we get if not better results. >> The 10 to 20 feet doesn't sound like very long. Is that just because of, >> 20 miles. >> Oh 20 miles. You said feet. So it's 10 to 20 mile runs, then in parts they take the data and run it again. And what was the weight of that payload? >> The sensor itself doesn't really weigh much, I'd say two or three pounds. Most of the payload on the Wind 8 is actually the batteries. So the whole all-up weight of the craft is somewhere around 30 pounds. It's not extremely heavy, but for endurance sake, she'll fly for well over an hour. So at 10, 15 miles per hour, you can really cover some pipeline with battery to spare. >> So was that an initial trial for this customer, to try this solution? >> Yeah, this particular combination of sensor and copter had never been tried before, so it very much is an industry first in this regard, at least with DJI and the sensor. >> So where do they want to go next? I mean, it begs the question. The whole theme of today's keynote was like scale, no longer single operator, single machine, single data, but really starting to think in terms of fleets and multi-units, so is that somewhere where this particular customer wants to go, or how do you see it progressing for them? >> This particular client is a third party, so they aren't directly with BP, but BP often, I don't want to speak on behalf of BP, but a lot of gas companies outsource their inspection services to other different companies, so this particular land surveying company will use this and meet their demands of inspecting whatever section of pipeline that they're designated every six months. >> Yeah, that's great, alright, Chris, thank you for spending a few minutes, I mean that's a great case study and using the big heavy lift stuff, much more fun probably than the Spark! >> Absolutely, yeah, if you guys have any questions, hit me up at quadrocopter.com! >> Alright, he's Chris Boots, I'm Jeff Frick, you are watching the Cube. We're at DJI AirWorks 2017 in Denver. Catch you next time; thanks for watching.