Features

Whilst there are other maps available that can be used to find buildings and streets, the PROWL system also has information about drone hazards, such as power lines, tree branches, moving air (from fans and air-conditioners), no-fly zones, privacy requests and much more. No other map provides the information that a drone needs to be safe in a journey.

With PROWL being crowd-sourced and constantly updated, temporary items such as construction cranes, flags, and public event no-fly-zones can be added and removed. A drone (or other flying vehicle) needs to have access to information that is current and valid, not just where to find an address.

The PROWL system is not just one database – it could draw on data from existing sources of geofenced and GPS defined objects – and future ones too! The system has been designed to extend to include new attributes in the database, as well as using a Service Bus to access existing online data repositories.

Data types can be extended with additional tags, such as when the object was last inspected or maintained. This will allow the system to be used for other purposes, such as a power company recording their power line maintenance, or tree species being monitored for pest outbreaks.

AI can also be used to extrapolate and create synthetic data from partial data submitted to the PROWL system.

As the content is crowd sourced and overlaid with information from other sources, errors can be removed by users’ feedback and by our own AI processes within the system. Invalid objects can be quickly corrected and/or removed through our proprietary back-end algorithms and quality of the data improves over time.

AI assesses all new objects to ensure that they align with existing known data, and may modify or delete new data to improve the overall database integrity.

Each user’s submissions are tagged, and if a user consistently provides poor data, their past submissions can be reviewed.

Users of the system can submit new polygons in return for a credit for their own future access the system. If a user finds that an object reference is inaccurate or wrong, they can submit a new object polygon, which the PROWL system will over-lay with existing data, and then our proprietary code enhances the quality of the overall data. For each unique and valid object a user supplies, they are rewarded with a defined amount of free lookups against the system.

Additionally, through arrangements with third party data sources, even more quality and data can be leveraged.

It doesn’t just stop at Drones – PROWL is applicable for autonomous cars, augmented reality, survey and analysis. A database of the GPS location of all physical objects is the aim – and with crowd sourced and extensible data sources, it can only get better!

With our extensible and flexible design and architecture, the PROWL system is able to adapt and extend, leveraging our custom back-end capabilities to enhance on existing data for new purposes.

Future aspirations are to accept SLAM / RTK / point-cloud data to process on our systems to create public models and maps through AI analysis.

Each polygon to represent an object can have multiple vertices – each one with it’s own GPS coordinates. The more GPS points the object has, the more accurate it is. A simple tower block will be simpler than an big old tree in a field, or a sports stadium. Ground level points are potentially the simplest object in the PROWL system.

Each object in the PROWL database is categorised so that your planning software can take into account the requirements of each hazard. Each polygon object has a hazard category, and can have hundreds of tags – including the owner of the virtual object, the owner of the physical object, what source or which user provided the object, when the object will expire, even the type of tree!