Intermap to work with Idronect on medical delivery in Africa

Geospatial content and intelligence solutions provider, Intermap Technologies has announced the successful integration of its NEXTView platform with the Idronect Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) system to support a medical delivery pilot project in Africa.
Idronect is a UTM system that belongs to Belgian aviation software company Aviatize BV, which was founded in 2015 by airline pilot and aviation engineer Tom Verbruggen and his partner, civil engineer Chris De Rouck. They then created Idronect OS and Idronect UTM, a management software for drone operators and authorities, which is used by clients in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
Among other things, the Idronect platform can be used for professional or recreational purposes identify flight paths and legal areas for autonomous flights; plan flights; and also manage flight equipment.
“Aviatize’s Idronect UTM will be the control hub for drones to fly beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) when delivering medicine to remote locations,” Intermap said in a statement. “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 IRIS-driven content creation engine and integrated supply chain to stream or deliver integrated data with low latency.”
Tom Verbruggen, the CEO of Aviatize hailed the partnership as a step in the right direction for BVLOS integration into airspaces.
“Integrating precise terrain and obstacle data is the logical next step for IDRONECT,” said Verbruggen. “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.”
Verbruggen’s counterpart at Intermap, Patrick Blott was equally excited about the prospects his company’s new relations with Aviatize can bring to unmanned aviation.
The Intermap CEO and chairman said; “NEXTView brings crucial enabling architecture to the UTM industry and its regulators. 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 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.”

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