Quentin Wheeler, a retired U.S. Navy helicopter pilot and the CEO of a North Carolina company called Applied Drone Systems, has been flying drone missions over flooded towns in southeastern North Carolina during the Hurricane Florence emergency. He is delivering condition assessments, but also refining his proposal to set up in-house drone departments and systems for departments of transportation using only secure U.S.-built drones and technology.
He proposes to help DOTs establish standardized systems by offering end-to-end services, including provisioning with U.S. built drones and a software management system built around an enterprise platform from Berkeley, Calif.-based 3DR called Site Scan. The software is developed by 3DR and the drone data is processed on U.S.-based servers, with users having complete ownership of their data. Wheeler also offers to train DOT pilots for flight, operations and mission planning.