Optelos: A Smart Way to Manage and Analyze Drone Data

David Tran, Founder and CEO

Drones are everywhere. The unmanned aerial vehicles have rapidly evolved from military surveillance to toys for tech enthusiasts and now as enterprise tools for businesses. Today different businesses are investing in these devices for survey, parcel deliveries, agriculture, and rescue operations. According to Gartner research reports, a staggering three million drones were produced globally in 2017. That’s a huge number of machines, collecting heaps of data. However, “actionable insights” is what significantly impacts profitability for large companies adopting a drone program. In an effort to meet the increasing need for drone information analysis, a comprehensive and innovative drone data analytics solution is difficult to come by. Austin-based Optelos was born out this necessity. Optelos offers advanced drone data analytics solutions that turn data into actionable insights. The company has mastered the techniques of maximizing drone data efficiency by seamlessly integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with intelligent visual data management.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Optelos’ founder and CEO, David Tran discusses the rise of drone technology and how their industry leading drone data analytics solutions are reinventing how Enterprises gain insights from drone data.

Walk us through some of the challenges that Optelos addresses with its innovative solution.

According to analysts, drones are being used over ten thousand times a day, typically collecting about 8 million images. Drones have been a game changer in industries including energy, infrastructure, telecom, and construction as an alternative to costly helicopters, light aircrafts, or manual inspections and surveys. This market growth is attributed to an increasing need to efficiently perform the collection and analysis for compliance and faster time to resolution.

Organizations using drone programs are able to capture vast volumes of data. The biggest challenge is keeping up with the sheer volume of unstructured data and deriving value out of it. As organizations are harnessing the potential of drones, they lack a unified workflow to manage, process, visualize, and analyze these data in a more automated way for effectively benefitting from this data. Our goal is to provide a standardized workflow for our customers to perform capture, analyze, visualize, and deliver actionable insights from drone data.

Please share some insights into Optelos’ products and solutions.

Our patent pending AI analytics and visual management platform helps gain insights from visual data.

Our goal is to provide a standardized workflow for our customers in drone data analytics

We do this by ingesting massive volumes of unstructured data that is automatically analyzed through our industry specific AI machine learning algorithms. We identify issues and deliver insights on a customizable, cloud based presentation interface. Our solutions can be deployed across many different verticals in which drones are utilized. We have developed an extensive platform for drone service providers and organizations, with a rich workflow management system that can be tailored to the specific requirements of every customer. The platform allows streamlining of business operations with real-time visibility and intelligent data analytics. The purpose built AI-based ML algorithms can accurately analyze imagery and video down to the pixel level and integrated with our visual data management presentation layer and dashboards to quickly deliver insights. Furthermore, our solution has the ability to work behind the customers’ firewall. The platform also has a number of visual presentation features that allows viewing, measuring, and annotating 3D point cloud, comparing high resolution Orthomosaic map, and even 360 Panorama data. This data is then wrapped in an easy-to-use UI to deliver results to stakeholders with a click of a button.

Please shed some light on the data analytics processes as well as the delivery methodology of Optelos’ solutions.

As data from drones are captured, it is uploaded into a secure data security management system. This captured data then undergoes a patent-pending process to correlate and link the information. Our technology automatically assembles this data to build highly structured and curated multi-dimensional relationships. We can provide geo-located imager overlaid on detail orthomsoaic maps, and 3D models for any type of asset management. This insightful technology allows clients to conduct inspections, measurements, and manage data. Finally, Optelos AI analytics automatically analyzes and detects defined issues within these data sets to deliver actionable insights across the verticals; all that with just the click of a button.

With our standard SaaS model, customers can sign up for monthly or annual subscriptions and access its unparalleled functionality and features. In addition, we provide custom branding and feature with our enterprise White Label solution. Moreover, the superior architecture of our platform makes it easy to deploy either on our secured cloud hosting platform or behind the customer’s firewall.

Please share a case study that highlights Optelos’ value proposition.

We have a customer based in Atlanta that provides drone data services to the construction and infrastructure space. They produce large volumes of different kinds of data and information— everything from work order to image collection, point clouds, and panoramas. They would spend days manually organizing the data in hard to use directories and struggled with providing an elegant all-inclusive portal for their clients to visualize the data. With Optelos, they can now organize and deliver this data to their clients within hours instead of days. Their customers are able to view the various data at any time.

What is Optelos’ next big plan?

Customer’s expectations of data management are rapidly evolving away from simple file storage and rudimentary access to the data. The fact is customers don’t want data, they want actionable answers. This means the seamless coupling of workflows, analytics, and delivery that is tailored for the customer with any number of industry use cases.

We are hard at work making data analytics and visual data management smarter and more adaptable than ever before. We are introducing more advance change detection, 3D tools, and faster data analytics to help customers find insights faster than ever before.