Drones World Editor Kartikeya in conversation with Mr.Bruno Queiroz, COO, Chemitek
Beyond the equipment, what was the key technical challenge in formulating cleaning agents specifically for drone delivery?
The key technical challenge was balancing cleaning efficiency with environment friendliness while remaining safe not just for the surfaces being cleaned but also to all the materials present in the drones.
How do the Drone Range products actively contribute to reducing the total cost and risk of maintaining large-scale industrial assets?
The Drone Range cleaning products enable faster, safer, and more-consistent cleaning with lower resource use — which together cut labour, downtime, consumable and environmental-compliance costs, and reduce asset-damage (e.g., drone wear) and warranty risks.
Can you give an example of a surface or a type of soiling that was previously too difficult or expensive to clean, which your new range now makes feasible?
The best example are industrial facilities and equipment (e.g., silos, chimneys) with inorganic contamination (e.g., cement, limestone, metal oxides). Without drones and the proper cleaning product, most of the cases would be just too expensive or too risky to clean.
Sustainability is a core mission; how do you ensure that “heavy-duty” cleaning performance doesn’t come at an environmental cost?
Since the creation of the company, our vision and mission have been creating products that effective while remaining environmentally friendly. The Drone Range has gone through extensive biodegradability tests by an independent laboratory, and the certificates are already available.
To be able to achieve both heavy-duty cleaning and biodegradability, it is necessary to use premium active principles and a clever combination of them. We have products with a combination of 6 different active principles in varying concentrations.
Looking at the full range, which product do you believe has the most potential to create an entirely new cleaning standard in its sector?
We believe that the Drone Surface Cleaning Agent – Inorganic will open a lot of new opportunities in the heavy industries sector. Being the first of its kind, it has the potential to become the standard in the drone cleaning industry.
With this launch, is Chemitek’s goal to supply cleaning specialists, or to enable new service-based businesses to emerge in the drone economy?
The Drone Range was thought for both seasoned specialists and new businesses.
We believe this range of solutions expands the drone cleaning market to new areas which will then create room for new businesses to emerge. For the specialists, it will provide them the right tools to make their services even more efficient and environmentally friendly.
What is the long-term vision for Chemitek’s role in the rapidly evolving ecosystem of autonomous and robotic maintenance?
Our vision is to continue to adding solutions to the robotic maintenance supported on our experience in robotic cleaning in solar and now in drone cleaning. We are working on more specialized solutions for both solar (e.g., AgroPV) and drone cleaning (e.g., greenhouses) that we expect to launch next year.
We aim to continue providing the chemical technology that makes automated and robotic maintenance systems both effective and environmentally responsible. In such a high pace new industry, our goal is to continue at its forefront developing new solutions and setting the standards.
