Today, Exyn Technologies, a specialist in the world of autonomous robotics and data collection, announced the release of Exyn Nexys. The new release is the company’s latest 3D mapping solution, and the announcement has been made ahead of Geo Week 2024, taking place in Denver, Colorado February 11-13. The Exyn Nexys is a modular 3D mapping solution that can be used as a handheld device as well as an attachment to a drone, ground robot, vehicle, or backpack.
The modularity is the big selling point for the Exyn Nexys, opening up a wide variety of potential use cases for the mapping solution, which can be used for complex indoor layouts, subterranean spaces, and complex outdoor environments. The Nexys includes a lidar scanner along with the company’s proprietary SLAM algorithms, providing quick capture speeds – capturing up to 1.9 million scan points per second – and real-time point cloud colorization. Crucially, it is also able to navigate autonomously through GPS-denied environments, with what Exyn refers to as Autonomy Level 4 capabilities that do not require human intervention.
Prior to the announcement, Geo Week News spoke with Exyn CEO Brandon Torres Declet, who joined the company as CEO late last year after a long career leading various companies throughout the drone industry. Declet told Geo Week News that the company made many customer calls throughout the process of developing this new tool to figure out exactly what was needed, which led to the modularity of Exyn Nexys.
“As we look at how our industry is expanding, and how these use cases are expanding, we thought to ourselves, Is there a way to make this product modular and more platform agnostic?” Declet said.
The modularity has certainly been achieved, and Exyn continues to work on making it compatible with the widest possible variety of platforms and hardware solutions to ensure it works with whatever type of drone or ground robot a user might have on hand.
“We tried to make it as platform-agnostic as possible,” Declet said. “You’re going to see more of that in the coming months from our company, more partnerships with these OEMs.”
As for why this is happening now, Declet points to a couple of different factors. One is that many of the components have shrunk, making it easier to create a modular system. The challenge was taking that to build the modular system while maintaining high levels of accuracy. According to Vanessa Varian, Vice President of Marketing for Exyn, what they are most proud of is being able to maintain those high levels of accuracy and calibration even while the system is being moved from, say, a robot to a backpack to a vehicle.
The other is shifts within the mapping industry. Today, there are more industries than ever that are interested and already using this technology, and firms who are expanding their offerings who want to avoid having to purchase many different systems for different jobs, and want to be able to do it quickly in order to get their other work done.
“[The customers] want the data, but they don’t want to take hours, and they don’t want to devote big teams to collect it,” Declet said. “I think what our product does is take these scans from hours to minutes, shrinking the amount of time that is necessary to collect that high-quality data.”
At its heart, Nexys builds off of established expertise and capabilities demonstrated by Exyn and applies these principals to a wider user base. As we’ve covered here before, the autonomy of Exyn’s offerings have helped enhance safety and efficiency on construction sites, and their innovation led to them being named one of three winners of the Pitch the Press conference at Geo Week 2023. Traditionally, the company’s products have been used for mines, but this modularity helps change that.
“I think [the modularity] opens the aperture on the use cases,” said Declet. “Obviously, our company in the past was very much focused on mining. Now, we think about the ability for modularity to come into play here, we think about a bunch of other different use applications in adjacent types of industries. You can think about, for example, ground robots in a manufacturing facility. Or an oil refinery, or in construction where you have a site that’s constantly changing and you want to be able to manage and monitor that. The modularity of the Exyn Nexys gives them the ability to fly a drone, or use a ground robot, or do a quick handheld scan of a particular part of that site. You can do all of that.”
