Skycatch and DJI's Big Deal

The two companies will be sending a shipment of a thousand drones to Japanese construction giant Komatsu. The drone model will be the Skycatch Explore1, a quadcopter based on DJI’s Matrice 100 and manufactured by the Chinese company using Skycatch’s machine vision software. It is the first time that DJI has made a custom drone for a partner.

These drones will use the machine vision to survey and monitor construction sites, with the ability to create maps that are accurate to within five centimetres. Being able to automate tasks such as monitoring stockpiles has a clear application for the construction industry and demonstrates that companies like Komatsu are really committed to innovation and this deal is sure to speed up what has been a slow uptake of the technology in a fairly “traditionalist” industry. But Komatsu has a further more specific use case scenario for these UAVs: using the data from the drones to control its robot construction vehicles, which are still under development.