WingtraOne GEN II debuts for professional VTOL flights

A new vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) drone — the WingtraOne GEN II — is now available. The GEN II offers industrial reliability and mapping versatility with an oblique camera configuration for high-quality 3D drone-mapping data capture.

Drone maker Wingtra spent six years developing the GEN II, and tested it over 100,000 flights. Its WingtraOne is being used by professionals worldwide across many industries.

According to Wingtra, the GEN II represents a solid step forward in industrialization and reliability along with new perks that push the previous limits of commercial mapping drones.

The WingtraOne GEN II. (Photo: Wingtra)

Oblique 3D Mapping Payload

“We wanted to make the WingtraOne drone even more versatile for our customers. So next to our flagship 42MP Sony RX1, we’re including new, high-end mapping payloads,” said Maximilian Boosfeld, co-founder and CEO of Wingtra. “I’m especially excited to announce our oblique solution, which offers outstanding 3D mapping results. It’s the perfect choice for capturing infrastructure — from a single industrial plant to entire cities.”

WingtraOne’s GEN II oblique mapping solution is backed by signed partnership agreements with Bentley Systems and Esri. To demonstrate the power of GEN II carrying its Oblique Sony A6100 payload, the Wingtra team mapped the city of Zurich, Switzerland, in six flight hours, producing a 3D model processed with both Bentley ContextCapture and Esri’s Site Scan for ArcGIS. Bentley and Esri’s software are both recommended for processing Wingtra oblique datasets.

“Bentley Systems is delighted to partner with Wingtra to transform high-resolution oblique imagery from WingtraOne drones into 3D reality meshes — an ideal starting point for infrastructure digital twins,” said Phil Christensen, VP, Industry Solutions, iTwin Context, Bentley Systems. “This enables our common users to perform analytics on the resulting models as well as leverage Bentley’s iTwin platform to share performant, city-scale digital twins.”

“Our partnership with Wingtra unlocks new capabilities for Site Scan for ArcGIS users by allowing them to create wide-scale and accurate 3D meshes leveraging the oblique payload on the WingtraOne Gen II,” said Richard Cooke, director of Global Business Development at Esri. “These high-resolution images processed through Site Scan produce an enriched 3D GIS for our users who require modelling of open-pit mines, accurate construction updates, creation of digital twins for cities, and more.”

The WingtraOne GEN II drone was used to map Zurich and create a digital twin of the city. (Image: Wingtra)

Integrated PPK and Self-Diagnosis

WingtraOne GEN II features post-processed kinematic (PPK) ability integrated on every drone, including multispectral Altum and RedEdge payloads, as well as advanced fail-safe and self-diagnosis algorithms and services for dependable operations.

“We have studied over 100,000 flights and all incoming customer reports to understand what the limits might be so we can push them further,” said Julian Surber, Wingtra product manager. “As a result, we’ve designed many reliability tools for GEN II to guarantee uninterrupted operations.”

Wingtra’s engineering team has redesigned the electronics of the GEN II from its predecessor WingtraOne for increased reliability, including a more powerful onboard computer, optimized PCB designs, and a new navigation and heading unit developed inhouse.

The GEN II runs through health-monitoring algorithms for motors, servos, batteries, camera, PPK and onboard sensors, health self checks that minimize the potential of flight  with unsafe equipment.

Precision Agriculture Boost

Wingtra’s top-of-the-line multispectral payloads Micasense Altum and RedEdge will now be paired with high-accuracy PPK, which improves the quality of multispectral insights for uses such as irrigation management and prescription maps for pesticides.