Sean Greenwood has a lot of accolades to his name: Olympian, the first Canadian UAV pilot to fly beyond visual line of sight in unrestricted airspace, a commercial helicopter pilot (those of you in Calgary and Vancouver may remember him flying the Global News chopper)--and TECTERRA’s 2019 Influencer of the Year.
The president and founder of Calgary-based Canadian UAVS, Canada’s leading unmanned aviation solutions provider for enterprise and military applications, Greenwood is a man with a mission: to make airspace monitoring more accurate and more cost effective by increasing geospatial fidelity.
In the oilfield, Canadian UAVS uses drones to perform surveillance and monitoring on pipelines, facilities and process sites, relieving people from performing dangerous or onerous on-site work in person. Images procured by these UAVs help engineers and technologists bring more geospatially referenced data to the development of infrastructure.
On the battlefield (or other militarily-significant terrain), Canadian UAVS helps provide Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) services to the Canadian military.
And in the just plain-old regular field, Canadian UAVS gives farmers precise information about crop health thanks to onboard near-infrared sensors. Such information lets growers tailor agricultural inputs—such as fertilizer or insecticide—to their land at scale, saving both time and resources and helping improve harvests.
It’s safe to say that this Alberta company, founded in 2015, is at the centre of many of our most important economic priorities, proving the centrality of geospatial technologies to our domestic prosperity and ability to compete internationally.
Who will be 2020’s Influencer of the Year? He or she will have some pretty big shoes to fill. We’ll announce our class of 2020 in June. For more information about Canadian UAVS, visit https://canadianuavs.com/.