ITRI has won the CES Innovation Awards for two consecutive years. Its Hybrid Power Drone with High Payload and Duration was named a CES 2019 Innovation Award Honoree in the Robotics and Drones category, and its spinoff ELECLEAN received the same honor with ELECLEAN Disinfectant Spray in Home Appliances. The two honorees will be showcased at Venetian Ballroom, CES Tech West in Las Vegas during January 8-11, 2019.
The annual CES Innovation Awards program honors outstanding product design and engineering in brand-new consumer technology products. According to the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), honorees are those whose products scored highly across all judging criteria, including engineering, aesthetic, and design qualities, user value, positive impact to quality of life, and competitiveness in the marketplace. This year’s honorees include leading companies such as NVIDIA, Honeywell, and Sony.
“This marks the second year in a row that ITRI has been named the CES Innovation Awards Honoree. We are very excited that ITRI’s market-oriented R&D achievements can stand out at CES, the global stage for innovation, which reveals ITRI’s outstanding innovation capability and its commitment to technology commercialization,” said ITRI President Edwin Liu. “We will continue to nurture startups like ELECLEAN and work closely with academia and industries to deliver successful collaboration results such as the Hybrid Power Drone with High Payload and Duration. Our aim is to develop novel solutions and assist industries to solve their problems and create uncontested market space,” he added.
ITRI’s Hybrid Power Drone with High Payload and Duration is an octocopter that can hover up to 45 minutes at 30 kg payload, which is over three times the endurance of a drone powered solely by lithium battery. The drone consists of an optimized carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) fuselage and a hybrid power system including the lightweight aviation internal combustion engine (ICE) and the high power density electric generator and lithium batteries. The hybrid system, with a power-to-weight ratio of 0.6 kg/kw at 7.5 kw output, is very light and can provide the enormous power demand of the over 3 m axis diameter octocopter. The drone passed a preliminary field test for a smart spray system in a mountainous tea garden in the end of 2017. With high payload, the drone can even carry granular fertilizers, proving its capabilities as an advanced agricultural drone for plant protection. With highly efficient electric propulsion and fault-tolerant autopilot, it can perform robust delivery service and long range infrastructure inspection as well.
