Commercial drones boost Fairbanks startups: NES and Aquilo on cutting edge of new technology.

• Author: Stricker, Julie
• Position: Telecom & Technology

For the past decade, biologist John O'Brien of ERM Alaska has been looking for a way to use unmanned aircraft to count salmon in Alaska rivers. In October 2015, he finally got his chance.

O'Brien met up with two people from a Fairbanks startup to compare a drone survey of salmon in Lignite Creek near Healy with a traditional helicopter survey. The experiment was a success. The drones, operated by Carl France and Corey Upton of Aquilo LLC, came back with markedly clearer and more stable video of the salmon in the creek, O'Brien notes.

"This is a great demonstration of the utility of this technology and it can be done safely and responsibly with low impact and extremely environmentally friendly with outstanding results," O'Brien says in the video.

A couple of weeks earlier, the crew was out filming an early season snowfall and came on a group of linemen trying to diagnose a power outage. They sent their drone along the powerline and helped the line crew pinpoint where trees were shorting out the lines, saving them hours of slogging through deep snow.

Booming Industry

Unmanned aircraft systems are booming, and Aquilo is at the cutting edge of a burgeoning industry. With the motto "Making Drones Work," Aquilo is one of a handful of FAA-approved commercial drone firms, offering unmanned systems operations, consulting, and training in Alaska and the Northwest. Carl France is CEO.

It is a subsidiary of Northern Embedded Solutions (NES), an engineering design firm started by three University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) engineering graduates. The trio started NES to develop data loggers, mini-computers that could be embedded in things such as unmanned aircraft and scientific instruments. They work closely with the Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration at UAF. NES founder Ben Neubauer helped design and build the Ptarmigan hexacopter, a workhorse for the organization. They also designed payloads and instruments carried by unmanned aircraft and are developing ideas such as smart plugins for cars, among other things.

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NES was created as a way to market the technology.

Neubauer moved away, and NES is now a three-way partnership between Steven Kibler, Corey Upton, and Samuel Vanderwaal. All three have strong ties to Fairbanks and were looking for a way to use their technical knowledge without having to leave the area. They found it in the rapidly expanding field of unmanned aircraft systems and associated technology.

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