I-CONIC has been selected among the 78 companies that applied for the new program jointly initiated by Swedish Armed Forces and the Swedish Innovation Agency, Vinnova. The aim of the program, which is organised by the LEAD Business Incubator, is to promote the development of dual-use technologies.
I-CONIC will continue develop its innovative solution to support GNSS-free drone navigation. Since I-CONIC can create 3D surface models (DSM) in real-time from the drone’s videostream, these can be used for Visual Positioning through matching with 3D reference DSMs. This is a more resilient solution than matching image-to-image or image-to-map, since it isn’t sensitive to differences due to light condition or seasonal changes. But it does require real-time 3D reconstruction, like I-CONIC’s software technology.
In the illustration, the left picture is a DSM created from the drone video, and the right picture is a reference DSM from aerial LIDAR created 5 years earlier. The close resemblance indicates a more robust solution than traditional ones.