Airborne Monitoring Takes Flight in Dubai

Bristol University’s Dr Tom Scott and Dr Oliver Payton, along with spin-out company ImiTec Ltd,  recently took their Advanced Airborne Radiation Monitoring System to Dubai and took on 1017 entrants from 165 countries competing in the ‘Drones for Good’ competition.

The ImiTec team were the highest scorers in the semi-finals for presentation and demonstration but fared less well in the service and technical evaluation categories. The team was honoured to be the only international entrant to be presented to the Emir of Dubai and to brief him on their project.

Chris Abbott, ImiTec CEO, said “We have had an invaluable opportunity to demonstrate our unique Advanced Airborne Radiation Monitoring System technology on a world stage and there has been a lot of interest in it. The event has been a great experience for the team and we are grateful for having had the opportunity to take part.”

The competition followed the team's most recent field trials of its radiation detection system at Fukushima site in October 2015. The Bristol team, in a joint expedition with Kyoto University, used its drone in the inner exclusion zone of the Fukushima fallout area, as well as in the restricted zone where cleanup activity is currently focused. 

Part of their work involved using 3D scanning LiDAR technology to record topography and radiation at the same time.

Dr Scott, who is director of the South West Nuclear Hub at Bristol, also delivered one of the recent EDF Energy Christmas Innovation lectures. His talk, 'Rise of the Drones', introduced a new concept for indoor mobile monitoring of radiation – Rad-blimp, a small, non-rigid airship equipped with a lightweight radiation mapping system.