Drones lack sufficient autonomy and intelligence

Industries fail to utilize drones and aerial vehicles efficiently, securely and quickly for industrial applications. As a result, we can’t increase the efficiency of human labor.

Drones become inefficient and primitive tools in the hands of a human operator, in terms of both in-flight and post-operation data handling. This limits the potential of aerial vehicles to maximize revenues in many industries such as energy, agriculture, security and more. 

Furthermore, these robots have very little access to real-time and long-term robotic intelligence that they can consume to become smarter and more autonomous. Being disconnected from a larger network also limits the collaborative operational capabilities of these aerial vehicles; i.e. multi-agent operation is not possible. The current commercial robotics paradigm is inefficient and limits the growth of many industries. 

We turn drones into mission-executing robots  

Soar Robotics’ cloud-based AI products make drones and any aerial vehicles smart and connected. We produce fully autonomous aerial vehicles that automate the work of humans in industrial applications.

Our drone-in-a-box solution deployed on factory premises

Our technology allows users to:

• reduce labor costs by more than 80%

• hire fewer technical personnel in challenging jobs and environments

• manage industrial zones 24/7 remotely 

• bring full autonomy to maximize revenues in industrial applications

Soar Robotics develops a cloud-connected robotic intelligence for aerial vehicles

Our system consists of an autonomous drone, recharging dock, data linking technology, weather protection features, and our cloud intelligence platform. The system is deployable in under 2 hours and is capable of serving almost any industry imaginable due to its modular system design.

We develop fully autonomous industrial drones and ground bases, which operate without a human pilot. Flight, data collection, battery recharge and data processing - these operating stages used to be part of a continuous cycle that needed human supervision. Thanks to our drone-in-a-box solution, this cycle is now automated and creates much greater value, at a fraction of its previous overall cost. 

Our current industry-specific services are:

  Tracking and reporting on the progress of solar plant construction, building construction, agricultural lands by routine surveys and maps.

   Detecting, analyzing and classifying defects in solar energy, agricultural lands, and critical infrastructure.

   Providing live aerial monitoring for almost any industrial site, such as factories, power plants, and cities.

Technology

We built the software and hardware for our autonomous drone systems from the ground up and designed them in a way that will allow us to scale our operations faster and easier. Soar’s onboard software, cloud software, and ground station systems can be integrated with many of the industry’s leading hardware and software, such as DJIs, Parrots, and Yuneecs. We also support any kind of proprietary MAVLINK and ROS powered drones.

By design, our software can pair not only with aerial vehicles but also ground and (in theory) space vehicles.

We have also been developing a novel communications hardware. It enables any drone to stay connected to the main network under almost any condition. This is extremely important especially for Beyond Visual Line of Sight Flights (BVLOS), which streamline commercial drone applications by enabling legal, remote and autonomous operations. Our hardware will pave the way for safe and easy BVLOS flights for almost any kind of aerial vehicle. 

The first iteration of the Cloud-connected robotic intelligence board (CRIB)

We have been rigorously testing our precision landing algorithm in various weather and lighting conditions. We have landed successfully for more than 50,000 times in real-life conditions and hundreds of thousands of times in the simulator environment. 

Precision visual landing on fiducial markers in a real environment

Signed contracts will generate $1M+ revenue next year

• 5+ accounts in the energy industry with $500K ARR potential in the sales pipeline.

• Planned to deploy 100 new systems to our existing customers in 2021.

Working with clients across four industries

Our drones will be inspecting and providing infrastructure security for 450 MW of electricity generation.

We are deploying 20 drone units to a security company who provides monitoring services for cities and large scale infrastructure units. Soar powered drones execute routine, fully autonomous surveillance missions. 

We have been testing our system through an agriculture data provider company with more than 20,000 farmers in its database to provide precise, actionable data on their fields.

We have successfully tested our autonomous progress tracking service from the pre-construction period until the end of a construction project. We are working to integrate our fully autonomous and intelligent cloud solution with the already existing drone operations of a large construction company.

Generating recurring revenue with Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) model

$300 billion market opportunity

According to PWC’s market predictions, the global market value for drone-enabled commercial solutions is estimated at $127B. With the widespread adoption of BVLOS flights and governments establishing regulatory frameworks around it, we expect that commercial drones will take a step closer to their full potential and span a +$300B addressable market until 2025. 

Soar Robotics' technology is hardware agnostic and fully autonomous

Human dependent workflows cause inefficiencies and thus losses in revenue. Full autonomy revolutionizes the way enterprises do business by eliminating the risks and costs caused by human operators. Hardware dependency means less flexibility and availability. Hardware dependent systems are limited in applications and thus scale much slower than hardware-agnostic systems. Our system implements the best of both worlds, bringing flexibility and availability to scale industrial applications and grow as every manufacturer in its network grows. 

A look to the future: multi-agent systems

With the funds raised, we hope to develop multi-agent systems that can accomplish tasks that are impossible for a single agent. We have been prototyping and simulating multi-agent interactions in surveillance, agriculture, parcel delivery, pipeline and railroad inspection environments.

We are also raising to speed up our delivery cycles and sales and to expand our engineering and marketing teams.

Why now?

The technology behind aerial vehicles, cloud computing and wireless communications has improved dramatically in the past decade. We now have the ability to construct a new system that utilizes these technologies and becomes a novel technology stack on top of them. With these advancements, we aim to become the leading cloud intelligence and connectivity hardware provider for any type of autonomous multi-agent system.

Soar Robotics has bootstrapped to develop its technology

We are bootstrapped - our founders have invested $600,000 of their own money to develop the product. Now, with a market-ready product, we hope a new fundraising round will help us to increase our delivery cycle and market development. 

Kerem Ozkan, Co-founder and Managing Director

•  Serial entrepreneur.

•  Founder of Calide Investments. Invested in start-ups in artificial intelligence, robotics, IoT, & renewable energy.

•  Founded & managed programmatic advertising agency PCA; oversaw strategic digital marketing for brands incl. Unilever, Nestle, KFC and Time Warner (sold Oct 2015).

•  Published +10 papers in AI & Visual Cognition of human. Papers featured in Visual Cognition, Perception, and Psychophysics and Journal of Vision. 

•  Ph.D., Cognitive Sciences & Artificial Intelligence, University of California, Irvine.

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Deniz Kalaslioglu, Co-founder and Technical Lead

•  +7 years of experience in AI-backed autonomous drones R&D.

•  BS, Electrical and electronics engineer specialized in embedded systems, aerial robotics software & hardware.

•  Helped big and medium-sized companies in Healthcare, Energy, Retail, Pharma, Government, Automotive, Construction and other verticals with end to end AI and automation implementation.

•  Lecturer in AI & robotics.