Spin-off of the EOC receives KfW Founders Award
The company “thermal DRONES GmbH”, founded as a spin-off of the German Aerospace Center e.V. (DLR) by Dr Martin Israel together with Tobias Dahms, received from the KfW investment and development bank one of the Founders Awards as a federal state winner in a companies competition.
The KfW Founders Award particularly distinguishes innovative companies throughout Germany. It selects one winner from each of the German federal states. The “thermal DRONES company” with its seat in Greifswald is the winner for the federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. “thermal DRONES” GmbH uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse drone images in order to protect fawns, hares, and ground nesters during agricultural field harvesting. With its “Flying Wildlife Rescuer” the company has brought to market a solution for quickly and reliably finding animals in the fields thanks to drone-provided thermal images and intelligent image processing. In Germany alone, over 500,000 wild animals die because of harvesting activities. “thermal DRONES” caters to customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and in addition to this drone-based wildlife finder is developing solutions for photovoltaic inspection, person trackers, and detecting clusters of smouldering ember.
As a trailblazer in the area of fawn rescue, between 1990 und 2020 DLR has developed and tested numerous approaches and prototypes for identifying and then safeguarding animals in the open countryside using remote sensing methodologies. From 2008 until the founding of the spin-off in 2020 Dr. Israel researched the drone-based detection of fawns at the Earth Observation Center (EOC) in Oberpfaffenhofen.
