Exyn Technologies, a provider of autonomous drones for complex, GPS-denied environments, today unveiled a new mission behavior for military surveillance and reconnaissance missions called Scoutonomy.

The Philadelphia-based company said its full-stack offering enables flexible deployment of individual or multiple aerial robots that can intelligently navigate and dynamically adapt to complex environments in real time. For the first time, industries like mining, logistics, and construction can benefit from a single, integrated solution to capture critical and time-sensitive data in a safer, more affordable, and more efficient way, claimed Exyn Technologies.

Exyn is a spinoff of the University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory and includes experts in autonomous systems, robotics, and industrial engineering. It raised $16 million in Series A funding last July, participated in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, and recently collected data from an inactive gold mine.

Exyn provides situational awareness in real time

Unlike other small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAVs) used for ground warfare, Exyn’s drones are capable of navigating within dynamic, complex, and dangerous environments without the need for a human operator or pre-loaded maps. These systems can rapidly gather critical information — including high-fidelity 3D maps and human and object detection — for superior situational awareness, said the company. 

“Our aerial robots provide unique capabilities that the government is seeking to develop and deploy,” stated Nader Elm, CEO of Exyn Technologies. “They are completely self-sufficient and a significantly valuable asset in providing superior situational awareness.”

“We’re most proud of our robots’ ability to identify threats, reduce operational risks, and save soldiers’ and civilian lives in unknown and volatile situations,” he added. “Now you can send a drone to perform highly sensitive missions that are far too dangerous for human soldiers and acquire data that is unprecedented in its level of detail, accuracy, and timeliness.”

Scoutonomy designed to save money, lives

In a bespoke configuration dubbed “Scoutonomy,” Exyn’s drones are able to collect key data to support military intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, such as mapping terrain and tangible structures and identifying the location of enemy forces and equipment. This approach not only serves to enhance military combat capabilities, but it can also lower operating costs and enable better usage of time and resources, according to the company.

Built on the exynAI platform, the aerial robots use artificial intelligence and a multitude of sensors to fly autonomously and without relying on GPS or external communications.

Another potentially valuable application of Scoutonomy is in supporting disaster-response and search-and-rescue efforts, as sUAVs help keep human responders out of harm’s way while accelerating the search for survivors trapped in hard-to-reach areas.

Whether the disaster event is natural or manmade, coordinating ground team response to locate injured and distressed individuals is usually the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of search-and-rescue incident response. Exyn said its drones can cover more area and relay critical information more efficiently, including details about the location of missing persons that help ground resources find them faster and more safely.