Use cases
Where autonomy pays for itself.
Autonomous fleets are worth the most where mission value scales with area and time rather than sensor depth. Wide, repetitive, continuous work. The kind currently done by flying the same pattern by hand, every shift, forever.
These are the problems Orbit is built around.
Case study · Coastal safety
Shark surveillance along the New South Wales coast is a coverage mission with a budget attached. It runs across 97 beaches, 72 of them every day of the year, and every flight is the same shape: fly the surf zone, look for a target a few metres long, escalate if you find one.
29,431
flights by one 50-drone fleet this season, up from 18,027
8,044
pilot hours to fly them, up from 4,897
$34M
public money already committed to drones and AI
Eight thousand hours is about four people flying full time for a year. Flights are up 63 percent on the previous season and hours are up 64 percent, so the labour scales one for one with the flying, and across the whole program that is now over 100,000 flights a year. That curve does not bend with more pilots. The mission is identical every time, which is exactly the property that makes it worth automating: a coverage pattern, a detection trigger, and an escalation path, composed once and run everywhere.
In Orbit that is three nodes on a graph, deployed to a fleet.
Figures are published New South Wales government program data. We are not a supplier to this program.
Same shape, different sector
Emergency response
Search grids and fire perimeters are coverage problems under time pressure. A fleet flies the pattern while the incident controller watches the map, and detections escalate the moment they clear a confidence threshold rather than when someone happens to be looking at the right screen.
Critical infrastructure
Ports, utilities, and council assets need presence rather than resolution. Three vehicles rotating hold a station no single airframe can, and the same mission runs at 2am without anyone rostered on to fly it.
Resources
Not survey work. Tailings dams, haul roads, and site perimeters that need looking at continuously rather than precisely, on sites where the flight itself is routine and the labour to fly it is not.
Defence
Attritable small platforms flown as a coordinated group, where losing one unit degrades the mission rather than ending it. Low kinetic energy makes the safety case tractable in exactly the environments where it is hardest to make.
Working with us
We are early and working directly with a small number of design partners. If one of these is your problem, you would be shaping the product rather than buying a finished one.
Tell us what you fly and how often.