Autonomous drone mapping startup Emesent has announced its latest survey-grade LiDAR payload: Hovermap ST. The lightweight, IP65-rated solution is being launched with Emesent’s new Automated Ground Control feature that, the company stresses, enables autonomous data capture in harsher environments than ever and for a wider range of use cases.
Australia-based Emesent has earned a reputation for reliably mapping challenging, GPS-denied environments (read underground mines and oil and gas platforms) since its 2019 launch. As a testimony to its success, you only have to look as far as the company’s recent series A funding round, which was oversubscribed and fetched Emesent a cool $23 million (AUD 32 million) in capital infusion.
Emesent’s LiDAR payloads leverage a process called simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), in which a drone builds a map and, at the same time, localizes the drone in that map.
While this technique is successful when it comes to…
