By Dronelife Features Editor Jim Magill
ABZ Innovation, a five-year-old Hungarian company that has become a leading manufacturer of spraying drones, is continuing to climb along its rapid growth trajectory, releasing new products, entering into partnerships that expand efficiencies of its UAV’s, and preparing to open the largest facility in Europe for the manufacture of non-military drones.
The company plans to hold a grand opening in September of its new 1,060-square-meter (11,410-square-foot) factory in Szentendre, just outside the capital of Budapest. The facility, which will more than quadruple ABZ’s manufacturing space, is expected to reach 50 percent capacity by the end of the year, producing about 85 drones per month, or 1,000 per year.
When it reaches its full capacity, the 7.5-million-euro ($8.6-million) facility is expected to employ 40 to 45 people and produce about 2,000 drones annually. Forbes has called the new production plant “Europe’s largest ‘civilian’ drone factory.”
“Our product portfolio goes from five-kilogram payload capacity up to 60-kilogram payload capacity for agricultural, cleaning and other use cases,” CEO Karoly Luvigh said in an interview.
Other Recent Milestones Recorded
Recently, ABZ announced a new partnership with Swiss software company Pix4D, which is expected to enable ABZ to bring enhanced precision to its agriculture spray drones. The use of Pix4D’s photogrammetry software and ABZ’s drones will enable farmers to optimize their crop yields by adjusting the rate of application of fertilizer or insecticide to meet the farmer’s individual needs.
In June, ABZ introduced a new product, the ABZ Clean Station — the first dedicated ground station engineered exclusively for drone-based industrial cleaning operations. Designed to be used in conjunction with the company’s C10 cleaning drone, the Clean Station provides the optimal water pressure and solution-mixing capabilities needed to enable the C10 to clean the exterior of buildings at heights of up to almost 200 feet.
Also last month, in a development that’s bound to pave the way for ABZ’s growth in the U.S. market, the company announced that its L50 drone had received conditional approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), exempting it from the agency’s Covered List. The approval confirms that the L50 does not pose a risk to U.S. national security and can continue to be sold and operated in the United States.
Luvigh said all of these developments taken together point toward ABZ’s continued pattern of rapid growth.
“We have been growing really fast. We have drones in over 40 countries. We have distributors in 28, and as of today, we are basically the best champion of heavy-duty action drones,” he said.
Pix4D Partnership Brings Precision Agriculture to ABZ Spray Drones
Each of these developments represent an opportunity for ABZ to expand its offering of services in the industrial spray-drone market. For example, the partnership with Pix4D will allow the company to provide farmers with data-based solutions tailored to specific agricultural challenges.
The Pix4D platform allows customers to load data about their crops, such as RGB and multispectral images into the drone’s software.
“What Pix4D does is it evaluates and processes these inputs on your crop health and will give you an output on what to spray and how to spray. So instead of spraying the whole field just to make sure, you can spray only the spots that are affected by the pests or the diseases,” Luvigh said.
“The drone will basically take off, and it will go only to the affected areas. It will spray only with the amount absolutely necessary, and then move to the next affected spot instead of going all the way up and down on the field.”
ABZ Clean Station Brings Industrial-Grade Power to Drone Facade Cleaning
For its part, the ABZ Clean Station works with the C10 drone to maximize its potential to clean the exterior of high-rise facades, shopping center exteriors, industrial sites and solar installations. The station features an industrial-grade high-pressure system, which delivers 150–200 bar, a metric unit of pressure measurement defined roughly equal to Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level.
This system is paired with a multi-stage water treatment chain that includes two-stage mechanical pre-filtration, a dual-column industrial water softener with automatic salt-solution regeneration to remove iron, calcium and magnesium from the supply water, and an optional Reverse Osmosis (RO) filtration unit capable of producing up to 600 liters of ultra-pure water per hour.
“In order to provide quality cleaning for reflective surfaces such as glass or metal or any other surface where you can spot the dots of water after cleaning, you will need a special solution to provide you absolutely clean, filtered water,” Luvigh said.
At 60 meters in length, the Cleaning Station’s hose allows the attached drones to clean virtually any building, except for the world’s taller skyscrapers.
“Ninety-nine percent of buildings around the world are not 60 meters or higher,” he said. “We try to find the balance between effective cleaning power and height. If you move higher, the hose and the weight of the hose, including the water inside, will get too heavy, and you will have to either decrease the pressure or the flow rate.”
Company Positioned for Continued Growth
Luvigh said ABZ’s status as a European company puts it in a good position to continue to grow its niche position in its two largest markets, the U.S. and the EU, as Western countries look for alternatives to drones produced in China, particularly those made by DJI, the market leader in spray drones.
“If you look around on the competitive scene for industrial drones in the U.S., Chinese drones are not in a very good position due to these bans. And then you have Western players. Those companies are usually twice to five time the price of the Chinese (drones), and in quality they are behind by three years,” he said.
“ABZ Innovation is actually on the same or similar price level as the Chinese, and is on the same or similar level in tech.” He emphasized the importance of the inclusion of ABZ’s L50 on the FCC’s conditional approval list. “This is a big deal because there are no other spraying drones on that list which are made in the US, so we are basically the only one,” he said.
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International
