Until recent times, the commercial and industrial drone industry centered around employing drones for cinematography and film making, mapping, surveying, pesticide spraying, and other operations, but there is now a sudden growing demand for drones that can do specialized “hands-on” tasks. These activities include the ability to grip and carry variously shaped goods with its arms, attach or join things, cut wires, turn dials, flip switches, drop lifesaver buoys, or recover hazardous materials, all of which humans are finding increasingly risky to do. There has also been a surge in demand for Drones that can perform a variety of tasks at high altitudes, across great distances, and in locations where it would be too dangerous for human intervention.

Enter the ProDrones-PD6B-AW-Arm. With this growing market in mind, Prodrone Co., Ltd. designed the PD6B-AW-ARM, a sizeable drone with two internally designed robotic arms that allows it to perform a range of functions directly. The drone can not only lift things but can even remain perched on a fence or railing, a feature that might be especially useful for recharging while in flight. The arms are highly agile, having the extra advantage of doing numerous actions and grabbing various objects in mid-air. Although it may have been designed and developed for jobs such as operating in high areas and gathering hazardous items that are not suitable for manual handling, it is possible that the simplicity of its use may merely be a front for all the applications the drone may see in the future.

In September 2016, during InterDrone, an International Drone Conference and Exposition, in Las Vegas, the upgraded model was unveiled. Apart from the PD68-AW-ARM, Prodrone, based in Nagoya, Japan, has collaborated with several industrial drone businesses to produce a wide variety of business and industrial drones.

Features

The PD6B-AW-ARM is built on Prodrone’s trademark big capacity PD6B-AW airframe, which can carry up to 20kg/44lbs in payload. The firm’s engineering team created two high-performance, entirely unique robotic arms with five degrees of freedom, each equipped with claws for grasping onto objects, for this six-rotor drone. They offer the drone the added ability to be able to operate in a variety of scenarios. The robot arms can carry up to 10 kg/22 lbs of weight, allowing it to carry big cameras and hefty parcels, and have a flight time of up to 30 minutes on a single charge, allowing it to excel at lengthier missions.

Fitted with a water-resistant, weather-sealed body and a relatively high wind resistance of 8 m/s / 17.9 mph, it also has a top speed of 37 mph and is built for industrial use. Adding to this, it boasts a 5000m operating altitude and features a 22.2v/16000mAh x2 battery capacity and a 27-inch propeller diameter. According to Prodrone, this makes it ideal for dangerous tasks like gathering and transporting hazardous materials, as well as more ordinary tasks like rearranging furniture, picking up boxes and crates, and carrying your luggage.

Aerial photography, mapping, agriculture, search and rescue, building industry, topography, and delivery are just a few of the uses for the Drone, which has an industrial focus.

ProDrone’s CEO, Masakazu Kono said the following in a statement when asked about why the ProDrone could be the next big thing in UAVs, “ProDrone has won high acclaim from numerous industrial drone businesses because we develop highly reliable, highly safe, high-performance industrial drones. We are firmly focused on the future of commercial drones and on being world pioneers in developing ‘task-oriented drones.’ The PD6B-AW-ARM makes a whole new range of tasks possible, and I am confident that nobody else could have made it.”

This drone is a one-of-a-kind machine that has the ability to combine many complex tasks into a single easy duty, making it a popular choice among industrialists. Although it appears to be a CGI-created machine for a film like Transformers, it is 100 percent genuine and equally impressive in terms of technology. The applications it sees in grasping objects are most likely simply the beginning of further breakthroughs.