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sampling
Like a drone over troubled water Start-up company Drones Over Water, founded in 2015 by Adelaide entrepreneur Dan Squire, is developing drones to collect and test potentially dangerous water samples from dangerous or difficult-to-access environments such as reservoirs, chemical spills, wastewater plants, tailings dams and ocean oil spills.
T
His prize included a $5000 travel scholarship to Austin, Texas, which he plans to use to pitch his idea to potential investors or business partners. If
he drones are capable of flying — either
an investor is found in the coming months, Squire
autonomously or with the help of a pilot — to a
aims to launch a product before the end of the year
programmed GPS position and collecting a sample
and possibly offer a service even sooner.
from a specific depth, using an attachment that
“I think the water industry is going to
hangs below the drone. Squire explained, “When
be our main customer, followed by probably
you lower it to a certain level the attachment opens
environmental, mining and also emergency, such
up, takes a water sample at that level, it closes and
as for a chemical spill or a spill on the ocean where
flies the sample back.”
you can’t put people’s lives at risk to go out and
The drone can test the sample on board or a
monitor that water if it is dangerous,” he said.
variety of parameters, including temperature, pH,
“A the end of the day, there’s no-one standing
conductivity and redox. This data can be sent to
on the edge of a boat or on the edge of the water to
the people who need it.
be endangered. You can also go out to watercourses
“At the moment we just save it on an SD card,
that people can’t go out on, like in the mines.”
but in the future, either through Wi-Fi or a 3G connection, we’ll be able to send it straight to the
This is a modified version of a news item
cloud and someone can access it basically as it’s
published by The Lead South Australia
happening,” Squire said.
under Creative Commons, with additional
Squire last year won first prize at the Flinders University New Venture Institute eNVIes awards.
24 | LAB+LIFE SCIENTIST - April 2016
information from Flinders University Marketing and Communications.
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