Flyability Brand Guidelines: The Lausanne Maker of Caged Drones for Confined Spaces

Two cousins from EPFL and a drone that could bump into things.

Flyability was founded in Lausanne in 2014 by the cousins Patrick Thévoz and Adrien Briod, the Swiss news service swissinfo.ch reported in February 2019. Both had recently finished master’s degrees in microtechnology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, EPFL; Thévoz then worked as a business strategy consultant and Briod completed a doctorate on flying robots. The company describes itself as a spin-off from EPFL and its Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, and says Briod’s research there produced the methods for stabilising drones in cluttered spaces on which its products are built.

The idea, Thévoz told swissinfo.ch, came from the disasters in Haiti in 2010 and Fukushima in 2011, when robots could not get into wrecked, obstacle-filled places. The founders studied insects, and flies in particular, to understand how they keep flying after a collision and find their way out of tight spaces. The result was a small, light drone meant to absorb knocks rather than avoid every one.

That drone was the Elios. As swissinfo.ch described it in 2019, it measured about 40 centimetres across inside a round carbon-fibre cage, carried LED lighting, a high-resolution video camera and a thermal camera, and was flown from a tablet. In 2015, a year after the company was founded, it won first prize in the Drones for Good competition held in Dubai, which swissinfo.ch called an ideal launching pad for making the start-up known internationally and attracting funding.

From disaster robots to industrial inspection.

The market turned out to be industry rather than rescue. Thévoz told swissinfo.ch that after the first video of the drone was published, interest came above all from companies in chemicals, oil, electricity and sewers. By 2019, the report said, Flyability had more than 300 clients worldwide, and the drone was mainly used to look inside industrial plants that need regular checks, for cracks, corrosion and other damage, in places such as refinery tanks and the steam generators of nuclear power stations. Its users also included police units, among them France’s RAID, firefighters and insurers. Thévoz said the company did not intend to sell its drones for military use.

Thévoz was candid about the path. He told swissinfo.ch that the road from the first prototypes to a commercial product had not been free of obstacles, that the company’s real competition was mostly scaffolding and inspection by people, and that the strongest demand had come from the United States and Europe, with growing interest from several emerging countries, particularly in Asia, where large industrial plants need regular inspection.

The current model, the Elios 3, was launched in May 2022. Tank Storage Magazine reported on 19 May 2022 that it carried a LiDAR sensor for indoor 3D mapping and a new simultaneous localisation and mapping engine called FlyAware, which builds 3D models in real time from the LiDAR and the drone’s three optical cameras, and the magazine described it as a pioneering collision-tolerant drone with a LiDAR sensor for indoor 3D mapping. LiDAR News reported that the launch came with a partnership with the mapping-software firm GeoSLAM.

Around the Elios 3 the company now sells interchangeable payloads, which its website lists as ultrasonic thickness, radiation and surveying modules and a gas sensor, together with a tether power unit and its Inspector software. It names oil and gas, maritime, power generation, chemicals, mining, sewers, cement and nuclear among the industries it serves. Flyability also lists awards for its drones, among them a Top 100 Swiss Startup Award in 2019 and an innovation award at the World Nuclear Exhibition in 2023, along with an EY entrepreneurs’ award in 2017.

Commercial drone makers.

Commercial drone makers sell instruments, not toys, and their pictures show it. The aircraft usually appear in the field rather than in a studio: a fixed-wing or vertical take-off airframe, often in white with a bright orange or another high-visibility colour, standing on gravel at a quarry edge, on a farm track or beside a pipeline before launch. The landscape matters as much as the machine, because the product being sold is the map, the model or the measurement that comes back.

Inspection and delivery makers have their own set pieces. Caged inspection drones are photographed inside boiler rooms, tanks, sewers and mines, lit only by their own lamps, with the protective frame as the defining shape. Delivery companies show a parcel being lowered on a line or dropped by a small parachute into a garden, a hospital yard or a field, so that the service, rather than the aircraft, carries the story.

People appear mainly as operators. A typical scene is a field crew in high-visibility clothing holding a tablet or a ground station, planning a flight or checking images on screen, with the drone small in the background. Brochures and websites follow the same order: the industry first, such as surveying, construction, mining, agriculture or public safety, then the workflow, then the hardware, with software screenshots and sample maps placed beside the aircraft.

Much of the industry still meets in person. Trade fairs such as Commercial UAV Expo and XPONENTIAL bring makers, software firms and operators to the same exhibition halls, where stands show airframes on plinths next to large screens of point clouds and orthophotos. In this guide we record what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made — and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still led by its two founders.

Flyability remains led by the cousins who founded it. Its website names Patrick Thévoz as co-founder and chief executive and Adrien Briod as co-founder and chief technology officer. The company, registered as Flyability SA, says it is headquartered in Paudex, on the edge of Lausanne, with offices in Denver, Shanghai and Singapore, and that it employs more than 120 people full-time. It puts the number of Elios drones in use at more than 2,750, in over 50 countries; those are the company’s own figures. Beyond the drones themselves, its website offers proof-of-concept trials, pilot training, a training simulator and support services, and a network of distributors in other countries.

In 2019 swissinfo.ch named Flyability one of the main symbols of what it called Switzerland’s “Drone Valley.” Thévoz told the service that having other drone companies nearby helped both collaboration and the trust of investors and clients. Flyability lists among its supporters EPFL, Scale-up Vaud, Venturelab, the FIT Foundation and Innosuisse, the Swiss innovation agency.

For a design guide, Flyability shows how a single idea — a drone inside a cage that can touch walls and keep flying — can carry a whole brand, from a research laboratory to tanks, boilers and sewers. Compare Skydio, another maker of drones built for inspection, and Wingtra, another Swiss drone maker. For this guide we use a carbon grey, a lamp amber and a concrete tone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Flyability’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.