It was an unusually frank confession from a police officer, and probably the best product advice Dave Kroetsch and his partners could have received.

“That’s cool,” the cop said of the concept behind Aeryon Labs’ flying surveillance robot, “but we’re not that bright, we’ve got fat fingers and we break things.”

Kroetsch and company heard the officer loud and clear. As a result, when their Aeryon Scout flew off the drawing board and into the sky in 2009, it quickly gained market altitude as its capabilities became known throughout military, law enforcement and commercial circles.

“We’re very much leading the market in our space,” Kroetsch, Aeryon’s President and CEO, said just days before Ernst & Young named the company as a 2011 finalist for its Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards. Days earlier, a CNN reporter had demonstrated of the ease of flying the Scout for a story on unmanned drones.

Now in use in 10 countries, the Scout – rebranded under the Datron name in some applications - has seen its reputation rise with the prominence of its assignments, from the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to political uprisings in the Middle East to popular protests in Greece over that country’s foundering economy.

“We find ourselves at the centre of all the big world issues,” Kroetsch said at Aeryon’s growing Waterloo headquarters, which employs 23 people including co-op students.

“We really see this product targeted at the backpack of every soldier and the trunk of every police car, and in order to do that, it’s got to be easy,” Kroetsch continued. “As soon as you’re focused on flying this thing – whether your mission is photographing a traffic accident or a crime scene, or seeing the bad guys who are shooting at you from the other side of the hill – you’re not focused on your mission.”

The small, lightweight, snap-together Scout is a testament to the focused mission that Kroetsch and co-founders Mike Peasgood and Steffen Lindner embarked on in the summer of 2006 and formalized as a company in 2007. They were still students and could afford nothing more sophisticated than a plane made out of foam from Home Depot with a consumer camera fixed to it.

“We came to this business really by taking some prior passions that we had,” Kroetsch said. “A couple of us had worked together at the university as part of the Waterloo Aerial Robotics Group,” which Kroetsch founded in 1997 as a young UW student.

The partners’ paths had also crossed during engineering stints at various Waterloo tech firms including PixStream (later acquired by Cisco Systems), VideoLocus (since acquired by LSI Corp.) and Research In Motion.

With a founding ethos of “do what you love, have fun and make money,” the trio settled on digital video as the bridge to take the Scout from fun tech toy to commercially hot commodity. They talked to the military, police, land surveyors, real estate photographers – everyone to whom a small, flying camera would be valuable.

They all loved the concept, but for different reasons. As a result, Aeryon had to make their vehicle easy to use for all, but variable in the tasks it could perform.

Company: Aeryon Labs Inc.

Location: Waterloo

Founded: 2007

Employees: 23

Key Investors:

Industrial Research Assistance Program (National Research Council, Government of Canada)

Scientific Research and Experimental Development Tax Incentive Program (Canada Revenue Agency)

Ontario Centres of Excellence (Ministry of Research and Innovation, Government of Ontario)

Friends and family



“The cops were like, ‘Can it see at night?’ Land surveyors were like, ‘I need really high-resolution pictures.’ The military: ‘I need to zoom in’,” Kroetsch said.

And so, the team devised interchangeable payload modules that simply snap into place on the Scout’s underbelly, allowing each user to customize it to their purpose.

The key to the Scout’s ease of use is its control system.

“Our user interface is a touchscreen tablet PC that basically runs off Google-like maps,” Kroetsch said. “So I press ‘take off’ and it takes off; ‘go over by this building’ and it goes there,” he added, mimicking the way the user would tap the Scout’s destination on the screen’s map.

“So, you’re not flying it; you’re just telling it where to go.”

Flight is achieved through just four moving parts: the propellers affixed horizontally to the end of each of the Scout’s four snap-on arms. If the unit crashes, you simply snap it back together and send it back into the sky.

With an operational weight of 1.2 kg (2.6 lbs) and a compact size of 80 by 80 by 20 cm, it does its job discreetly and often goes undetected.

The Scout has thus been steadily proving its potential worth at crime scenes, construction sites, war zones, natural disasters - anywhere people need to gather crisp aerial images quickly and easily, in just about any kind of weather.

Kroetsch was at home by the phone on a weekend in November of 2009 when the Scout notched an early victory in the sky over a Central American jungle. Authorities had discovered a clandestine drug lab, and sent the vehicle up for a look before they raided the compound.

The images it gathered, rendered at 100 times the resolution of a satellite photo, provided enough detail to show gaps in the perimeter fencing, allowing agents to slip in undetected rather than crash blindly into the compound in an armoured vehicle, a far more dangerous exercise.

“It was really exciting when we started getting pictures back from it,” he said. “Because we weren’t there, it was almost like it wasn’t real,” but the raid was successful thanks to the still photos and real-time streaming video gathered by the Scout.

Kroetsch used his BlackBerry PlayBook to show off images from the raid and footage from an episode of Flashpoint, a popular police drama that airs on CTV in Canada and CBS in the United States.

“The premise of the show is this kidnapped girl is lost and they can’t get their helicopter, so they send the Scout in to save the day,” Kroetsch said, as the PlayBook displayed Scout-recorded video of the kidnapped girl. “We haven’t even finished zooming in yet,” he said as the girl’s face came into ever-tighter view from about 80 metres away. “It’s quite impressive.”

Back in the real world, the Scout was able to map 60 acres of land in 12 minutes in a recent exercise, an achievement sure to resonate with disaster relief co-ordinators, since satellite photos are immediately obsolete after, say, an earthquake flattens a built landscape.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has also independently tested the Scout “and we have met or exceeded every single spec,” Kroetsch said.

With its new double-in-size headquarters, a growing list of defence, government and commercial clients and a thriving Waterloo Region tech ecosystem from which to draw, Aeryon’s horizon appears bright.

“We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Waterloo, for so many reasons,” Kroetsch said, citing the steady stream of potential employees knocking at his door, despite a region-wide shortage of tech workers.

“We have no shortage of talent,” he said, “and it also helps that we build a sexy product.”



Links:

Aeryon Labs Website

Aeryon Labs YouTube channel

CNN's article on Aeryon