Unmanned inspector Supercam S350 patrols highways

In early 2020, Unmanned System Group and “Avtodor-toll roads” conducted an experiment to use unmanned aerial vehicles for automatic road patrol. As the experiment was successful, a pilot exploitation of Supercam unmanned complexes was launched to monitor a section of “M4 Don” highway.

Country road safety always has been an important task. According to official statistics, if the car stops on highway for more than 10 minutes, a collision with other vehicles occurs. The survey complex can detect traffic stop in unauthorized places, illegal u-turns and back runs in automatic mode. When violation is detected, photo and video are sent automatically to the computer-aided control station with exact location of the vehicle on the road. Dispatcher analyzes the information and can call the average surveyor to prevent emergency.

The complex includes Supercam S350 UAV equipped with high resolution camera and onboard computer vision system using neural network. The drone can stay airborne up to 4.5 h at maximum distance up to 240 km with max.speed 120 km/h.

During pilot exploitation the system is being finalized, improving violation-detection algorithms and flight methods. In future, survey sectors are planned to be expanded, new UAV types will be used and the service will be implemented on a regular basis on most high-speed roads of Russia.