A Little Story
About Us
Our heart beats for technology – especially tethered drone technology – data and high-quality standards, after all we’re a team made mostly of engineers who love the challenge of designing and developing innovative technologies.
It began with AWE
Kiteswarms begun thanks to Reinhart Paelinck’s passion for developing cutting-edge kites and airborne wind energy. In 2017, Reinhart got in touch with Prof. Dr. Moritz Diehl, an expert of Airborne Wind Energy (AWE), to explore the possibility of a dedicated research project at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and find out if the idea of harvesting high-altitude wind energy with swarms of tethered drones is cost-efficient and feasible, not just from a research perspective but also as a product.
Off-the-shelf components were either prohibitively expensive for a start-up, or performance was too constrained to achieve a functioning prototype, so the first team members of Kiteswarms decided to build the technological backbone from scratch. This has proved to be extremely valuable.
How the story developed
Our main milestones
- adaptation of hard-, firm- and software to the drones’ requirements
- studying quadrotor dynamics and their mathematical description
- Adoption of a throwawayability approach and a radical simplification of components
- Implementation of a cutting-edge state-estimation system
Despite very positive results, 2019 was already a turning-point. We started considering applications of our experiences with tethered drones, optimized robotics platform and team not just for AWE purposes but in the broader commercial drone market.
New applications
AWE is not the only application that requires tethered drone technology like ours; we can adapt our system, a Robotics Platform, to many different projects. We built it to be able to implement solutions at any level of the technology stack, software, firmware, embedded systems and algorithms without struggling with compatibility issues. This approach enables rapid product development and prototyping.
Our Lab
Good ideas and change come from leveraging different backgrounds and know-hows, and that’s why we nurture close connections to both academic institutions (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Hochschule Offenburg, Il Politecnico di Milano) as well as other R&D organizations (Ampyx, Telocate).
Fresher ideas and different points of view translate into more value for you.
Our Lab
Freiburg is where we are located with a wide office space that accommodates a lab, as well as a workshop. There is also enough room and infrastructure for servers that can be used to perform large virtual experiments.
This gives us more freedom and flexibility to perform experiments and ultimately deliver you with high quality products.