Percepto’s latest FAA waiver allows single pilot to oversee 30 automated drones at once

Surging automated drone tech company Percepto has added another Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) achievement to its growing list, which in this case allows the company to remotely operate up to 30 of its UAVs using only one pilot.

Israel-based Percepto had over the months racked up increasing numbers and diversifying kinds of beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) authorizations from the FAA, placing its automated drones used for inspection, mapping, surveying, and other enterprise applications at the very edge of the vanguard of automated UAV solution developers. Today the company pushed that advanced position even further by announcing it has received an FAA waiver for a single operator to oversee several of its craft remotely at the same time – up to 30, according to the decision.

The ability to remotely deploy its drones in swarm formation is a regulatory coup for Percepto, but an even bigger boost for its enterprise clients – especially those in heavy industry and energy activities. 

While its automated drones take much of the work out of infrastructure inspection and other tasks by flying and performing tasks on their own, Percepto says the FAA permission to deploy up to 30 craft under a single operator’s supervision will permit dramatic advances in efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

That, the company says, will mean considerable savings for big clients, but also significantly lower the costs of automated, swarm-conducted UAV inspections in general. That, it adds, should permit smaller companies take advantage of aerial solutions for the first time, too.

Today’s announcement of its new FAA authorization is the most recent in what has become an upward virtuous cycle of approvals, facilitated by its continuing work with the US regulator.

“This waiver builds on Percepto’s years of regulatory efforts, allowing for safe nationwide drone BVLOS operations with no humans on site or the need for expensive radars, using remote pre-flight checks, extensive automation, and now the ability to operate up to 30 drone-in-a-box systems simultaneously,” said Percepto chief commercial officer Ariel Avitan. “It also comes as the last piece of the remote operations puzzle, alongside Percepto’s state-of-the-art drone-in-a-box hardware and autonomous inspection software.”

The development is also good news for the wider drone industry, which is always looking for leaders to establish new use cases and regulatory precedents that others can follow.

It meanwhile promises to reduce the time, money, and environmental damage that companies, municipalities, and surrounding communities often suffer when big industrial or energy infrastructure like transmission wires or pipelines break down.

“Simply put, with large-scale remote inspections we’ll see fewer large-scale safety and environmental failures across critical infrastructure,” Avitan says.