Video Transcript
A Brooklyn company that provides high-resolution aerial imagery says that it has deployed a first-of-its-kind network of robots in Earth’s stratosphere.
Near Space Labs announced in November that the company’s robots, known as “Swift,” were operating “across the United States.” The 12-pound system includes an AI-enabled robotic camera that flies on a weather balloon at elevations of between 60,000 and 85,000 feet.
Company officials said that Swift can capture footage across up to 1,000 square kilometers on each flight—an area roughly the size of New York City—to provide detailed and up-to-date images at sharply reduced costs.
Near Space Labs said that the technology could be used by government agencies and urban planners but that it could be particularly critical for insurance companies, which have abandoned some markets altogether amid mounting costs related to increasingly severe weather and wildfires.
Near Space Labs CEO Rema Matevosyan said that many insurers continue to rely on 1950s-era technology to capture data from the air and that those outdated methods, in turn, lead to faulty pricing and insurer losses.
Monitoring from Swift, meanwhile, can update property data on a quarterly basis, improving risk assessments and pricing practices—and, potentially, allowing insurers to return to markets that they previously departed.
