Intermap Technologies a global leader in geospatial content and intelligence solutions, today announced the successful integration of its NEXTView™ platform with Aviatize’s IDRONECT UTM to support a medical delivery pilot project in Africa.
NEXTView is the world’s first and only global, multi-sourced surface data platform that is government certified for use in commercial aviation applications. Developed in partnership with Lufthansa Systems, this is the second strategic deployment for NEXTView in Africa. Aviatize’s IDRONECT UTM (Unmanned Traffic Management system) will be the control hub for drones to fly beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) when delivering medicine to remote locations. While certification is not yet required for navigation and safety data used in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) that fly within visual range, it is widely expected that regulatory certification will be required within the next several years for BVLOS drones as the delivery infrastructure is established and commercial applications proliferate.
Integrating NEXTView with IDRONECT UTM enables safer and more efficient UAS operations. Flightpaths designed with NEXTView are more direct due to the rendering of terrain and obstacles from multiple sources with extremely high efficiency and acuity. With its accuracy and scale, NEXTView improves safety for the aircraft, as well as for people and property on the ground. The platform’s cloud-native delivery architecture is agnostic to the way customers choose to consume data and leverages Intermap’s proprietary IRISTM-driven content creation engine and integrated supply chain to stream or deliver integrated data with low latency.
“Integrating precise terrain and obstacle data is the logical next step for IDRONECT,” said Tom Verbruggen, CEO of Aviatize. “We keep innovating our products on a continual basis, in sync with the drone industry itself, where we see a transition to BVLOS flights. When you plan a BVLOS flight, you need to be able to rely on accurate terrain and obstacle data for optimum and safe flight routing. With NEXTView data, we give our operators the best possible tools for planning and executing their flights safely.”
“NEXTView brings crucial enabling architecture to the UTM industry and its regulators,” said Patrick A. Blott, Intermap Chairman and CEO. “Companies like Aviatize require multi-source geospatial content, delivered quickly as a service, and supported by flexible architecture, and a resilient, fully integrated supply chain. Partnerships like this one announced today are creating a whole new transportation infrastructure that will grow over the coming years and become one of the backbones of all economies. We are excited to be an invaluable element of that foundation at such an early stage.”
