NACT Engineering

Controllable Lighting for Drone Inspection

Drones has been used as an eye in the sky for a number of years in both indoor and outdoor inspection/surveillance. Drones are able to navigate faster and through tighter corners in comparison to humans or ground robots, and is considered a strong competitor to any other forms of robotics automation, due to:

  1. High availability
  2. Lower capital cost
  3. Lower amortization values

Good quality imaging is equivalent to the quality of inspection/surveillance. Camera performance is highly dependent on surrounding lighting conditions, which affects:

  1. Speed of camera shots, resulting the movement speed of drone manoeuvring
  2. Sharpness of image
  3. Clarity and resolution of images

Vision analytics are empowering drone camera footages with advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) to achieve some form of automation. Many applications include bar code/QR scanning, object identification or words/pattern recognition. More than often the results of the AI are dependent on the image quality, which traditionally plaques drones in poor lighting conditions, severely handicapping the drone work effectiveness and value.

Drone Camera Background:

Cameras are essentially electro optics sensors. Ideally a camera obtains the sharpest image when the shutter speed is the lowest, and least noise at the lowest ISO settings, and more surrounding details with a smaller aperture setting. All these parameters thrive on good lighting sources, which is unfortunately in the mercy of surrounding lighting conditions.

One popular method to enhance the environment lighting is through mounting a light source on the drone. Due to weight and power sensitivity of drones, it can only carry a traditional light source of limited performance.

Impact of Nact Lighting Solutions

Nact Engineering has developed the S@N10K to be fitted on small commercial drones so as to achieve short and medium range lighting comparable to day lighting conditions. Weighing only 150g and the ability to throw 10,000 lumens of lighting in a versatile package, the S@N10K is uniquely suited to be mounted on drones and robots alike. Of note, significant details are captured by the drone which was traditionally not possible.

Controllable Lighting for Drone Inspection

On top of powerful physical performance, the Nact S@N10K lighting comes with adjustable lighting in steps of 1000, allowing users to make minute changes to the light output so as to achieve the very best amount of illumination for the best camera and AI results. Thus, the very same lighting solution can be adjusted on the fly for both day and night, outdoor or indoor applications.

Contact us at info@nactengineering.com if you want to find out more about our powerful light core range.

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Mr Ooi Joon Hin

Board Director

Mr. Ooi is a director of Millennia-VFT Ventures Pte Ltd, and a managing director at Millennia Investment Management Pte Ltd, with more than two decades of investment management and banking experience. Prior to Millennia, he was with Lehman Brothers’ Investment Banking Division from 1994 to 2002 and worked in that firm’s New York, Hong Kong, and Singapore offices. He served as Senior Vice President and Co-head of Lehman Brothers Asia Energy Group from 2001-2002 and prior to that was Vice President of corporate finance execution for Lehman Brothers’ Southeast Asian investment banking team. Before joining Lehman Brothers, he was a senior accountant with Grant Thornton in New York from 1988 to 1992

Mr Raymond Lum

Board Director

Mr. Lum is currently the Managing Director of JLB Alliance Pte Ltd, a corporate finance advisory firm in Singapore. He brings more than 24 years of experience in operations and management, of which 17 years within the technology sector. Mr. Lum led efforts in digital transformation, mergers & acquisitions, corporate planning, business operations, and international business expansion within the technology, built environment, real estate, retail, distribution and logistics & fulfilment sectors.

Prior to joining JLB Alliance, Mr. Lum was the COO of Boustead Projects Ltd, and held various roles in TeleChoice International Ltd, SIA Engineering Company Ltd, KPMG Corporate Finance Pte Ltd, Infocom-Media Development Authority, ST Electronics (Info-software systems) Pte Ltd and Squire Mech Pte Ltd.

Mr. Lum is a Senior Member of the Institution of Engineers Singapore, a Fellow Chartered Accountant of Singapore, a Chartered Accountant of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, and a Member of the Singapore Institute of Directors. He holds a Master of Business Administration from Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Master of Science in Applied Finance from the Singapore Management University, and Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) from the National University of Singapore.

Mr Chang Yew Kong

Board Director

Mr. Chang Yew Kong is Chairman of SIT IAC (ICT), Chairman of Wizvision, and serves on the Boards of HTX, DSCO and Tag Team. He is also Mentor/Advisor to SMEs in various technology sectors since retiring in 2016.

Mr Chang was President of ST Electronics Limited Software Systems Group (SSG) in July 2010, comprising ST Electronics (Info-Software Systems), ST Electronics (Training & Simulation Systems) and ST Electronics (Enterprise 1). He was also President / General Manager of STEE-InfoSoft from 1997 to December 2013.

Mr Chang served in the Defence Science Organisation/MINDEF (1978 to 1985) and Data General Singapore (1985 to 1987) before joining Singapore Technologies. He held various senior management positions in the then Singapore Computer Systems Ltd (SCS) from 1987 to 1996.

Mr. Chang graduated from the then University of Singapore with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering (First Class Honours) in 1978. He completed his Masters in Engineering and a Diploma in Business Administration in the National University of Singapore in 1982 and 1984 respectively and attended the Stanford-NUS Executive Program. Mr Chang is a Senior Member of Institution of Engineers (Singapore) and a Fellow of Singapore Computer Society.