In heavy industry, there are places even robots were never supposed to go. Deep inside boilers and tanks, down lightless sewer lines, behind concrete in nuclear storage vaults and inside the maze of a data center under construction, workers still climb into spaces that are dark, unpredictable and often deadly. Those confined spaces sit at the intersection of three relentless pressures: keeping people safe, keeping assets online and keeping regulators satisfied.
For more than a decade, Swiss deep‑tech company Flyability has been rewriting the rules for how asset owners and operators inspect those spaces. Its flagship Elios 3 platform, a collision‑tolerant indoor drone wrapped in a carbon cage and packed with LiDAR, lights and mission‑specific payloads, has become the go-to system for confined‑space inspections across energy, infrastructure and critical facilities. Here’s why.
The Man In the Middle
Junio Valerio Palomba, Flyability’s Managing Director for the Americas sits in the middle, between global end users and Flyability. He leads a growing transatlantic commercial team and distributor network that spans the Americas and Europe, tand carries profit and loss (P&L) responsibility across both regions.
Palomba brings an unusual blend of executive training and field‑level insight: an Executive MBA, an MSc in Economics and a BA in International Relations layered on top of almost ten years inside Flyability’s growth story. He is multilingual in English, French and Italian and serves as a Discipline Expert in Aerial Robotics with the SPE Robotics and Autonomous Systems Technical Section, which lets him translate between frontline inspectors, engineers and boardrooms that are all grappling with what autonomy means in their operations.
When Palomba talks about the future of indoor inspection drones, he does so as someone who sees the human cost up close and the commercial upside in equal measure. Confined‑space fatalities remain stubbornly high, he said. Atmospheric hazards and rescue attempts drive a disproportionate share of deaths, even as regulators from California OSHA to UK duty‑of‑care authorities raise the bar on what employers must do to protect their people. At the same time, asset owners face mounting economic pressure to shorten outages, document inspections in more detail and prove that they used every available tool before sending anyone inside. Flyability exists to bridge the gap at the nexus of those two issues.
Lausanne Spinout Turns Global Inspection Workhorse
Flyability began as a spinout of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland when co-founder and CTO Adrien Briod decided to solve the problem of how to fly safely in GPS-denied, confined spaces. Instead of over‑sensoring a fragile airframe, he looked to nature and, drawing inspiration from the fruit fly’s ability to read and learn from its environment, concluded that the best way to fly indoors is to use collisions, rather than avoid them. That insight led to Evo, a tape‑and‑zip‑tie prototype, that went on to win the Drones for Good competition in Abu Dhabi and secure the seed funding that launched the company.
Eleven years later, the company has grown to about 150 people, with core engineering, R&D and manufacturing still centered in Switzerland and commercial teams now distributed across Europe, Asia‑Pacific and the Americas. Palomba has been part of that journey for nine and a half years. Over the last two and a half of those, he has led Flyability’s Denver‑based Americas operation through rapid expansion. He grew the office from four to thirteen staff as demand for confined‑space inspection surged in energy, infrastructure and critical facilities.
Safety, Cost And Compliance In Confined Spaces
The promise of indoor drones only makes sense when you understand the scale of the confined‑space problem. Every year in the United States alone, roughly 2.1 million workers require an entry permit for confined spaces. In these environments (think: tanks, boilers, sewers, underground mines, nuclear storage vaults and turbines), GPS fails, visibility remains poor, hazards are often invisible and any given space’s configuration may have shifted since the last inspection.
The risks remain significant. On average, about 92 confined‑space fatalities occur each year in the U.S. alone. A striking 60 percent of those involved would‑be rescuers who enter to save someone else. As Palomba put it, this is a recurring tragedy that is “incredibly preventable” because better tools are available.
Traditional inspection workflows compound that risk with cost and downtime. Scaffolding inside a large storage tank or boiler can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, require days of setup and teardown and expose personnel to a “double whammy” (Palomba’s words) of confined space plus work at height. Asset owners in energy, maritime and heavy industry lose revenue for every hour those assets sit idle awaiting inspection.
Why Elios 3 Leads Indoor Inspection
Against that context, Elios 3 has become what Palomba describes as the world’s leading indoor inspection drone. Flyability has nearly 3,000 Elios systems deployed in more than fifty countries, and the platform continues to win industry awards from sectors as demanding as offshore energy and nuclear power. Three design philosophies drive that position.
First, collision tolerance is non‑negotiable. The spherical carbon cage that makes Elios instantly recognizable started as a necessity and evolved into a competitive advantage. It protects both people and infrastructure, lets pilots “expect the unexpected” and makes it physically possible to fly a UT (ultrasonic testing) probe into direct contact with steel without shredding propellers. Palomba joked that without the cage, thickness measurement campaigns would devolve into “one measurement, one lost drone.”
Second, the platform pairs maneuverability with stability that many operators compare to outdoor drones, but indoors. A LiDAR payload feeds real‑time perception into the flight control system. This enables smooth, stable flight in dark, cluttered, GPS‑denied structures where maps are frequently outdated or absent. As Palomba framed it, it is easier to turn a seasoned NDT inspector into a drone pilot for Elios 3 than it is to train a traditional drone operator in the intricacies of industrial inspection.
Third, Elios 3 is modular by design. The base aircraft carries high‑performance lighting and imaging, and operators can plug in mission‑specific payloads like a radiation sensor, the UT module and a flammable‑gas sensor. This modularity stretches return on investment (ROI) by allowing one aircraft to support many missions across energy, nuclear, maritime, infrastructure and public safety use cases. “We designed the platform to be modular from day one, so the same drone can evolve with the mission,” Palomba explained.
Visuals To Digital Twins: Data As The Product
Elios 3 is not just a flying camera in a cage. It is a data collection and digitization platform for spaces that have historically resisted digital mapping. The onboard LiDAR continuously builds a 3D map of the environment as the drone flies, while the pilot navigates and records both visual and thermal imagery.
That data flows into Flyability’s software ecosystem. Cockpit, the tablet‑based flight app, provides pilots with stabilized live video, LiDAR‑based situational awareness and tools for setting waypoints and points‑of‑interest along the flight path. After the mission, Inspector ingests both camera and LiDAR data for post‑processing, enabling teams to build accurate 3D models and digital twins of tanks, boilers, mines, tunnels and other confined assets.
For maintenance and asset managers, that combination is key. Instead of relying on incomplete drawings or “tribal knowledge” about aging infrastructure, they can build libraries of indoor digital twins that track defects, corrosion and repairs over time. Palomba notes that this capability was “basically science fiction” for confined spaces just a few years ago, but is now routine for Elios 3 customers. “We have customers creating entire digital twins of their assets, not just outdoors but indoors. For any maintenance manager, that is invaluable, actionable intelligence,” he said.
Extending Time On Target
In industrial reality, flight time inside a confined space is the window in which inspectors can safely collect the most valuable data. Palomba candidly noted that battery duration remains one of the main points of feedback from customers, who naturally compare indoor platforms to outdoor drones that can fly 40 to 50 minutes.
Flyability has pushed that constraint from two directions. A new high‑capacity battery delivers up to roughly 15 minutes of flight time, depending on payload configuration. That represents about a 50 percent increase for typical inspection setups.
For missions that require hundreds of individual thickness measurements or extended exploration, the company’s new tethered power unit effectively decouples endurance from battery capacity. The tether supplies power only, but that is enough to keep Elios 3 in the air for hours at a time in ballast tanks, offshore platforms and large industrial vessels, where battery carriage limits and charging logistics equate to real constraints. “Suddenly you have a drone capable of flying for several hours, repeatedly, continuously, going from point to point to gather all the data you need,” Palomba noted.
For classification societies and regulators, tethered operations with UT payloads have opened the door to formal recognition of drone‑based inspections for certain surveys and class requirements, particularly in the maritime sector.
Seeing The Invisible
Not all risks in confined spaces are visible. According to Palomba, 56 to 58 percent of confined‑space fatalities are tied to atmospheric hazards like oxygen deficiency or toxic gases. These invisible threats can overcome a worker before they reach an exit.
Flyability’s flammable‑gas sensor payload responds to that reality. The module plugs into Elios 3 and allows operators to characterize the atmosphere before authorizing human entry, particularly in tanks and process vessels where gas accumulation is common. That capability aligns with the company’s broader philosophy that drones do not replace human workers, but instead act as advanced scouts that reduce the risks they face.
Lighting is another area where user feedback directly shaped the platform. Inspectors in oil and gas told Flyability they needed to replicate the “torch in hand” technique used to detect pitting corrosion by raking light across surfaces at a 45‑degree angle. Elios 3’s lighting architecture allows operators to do exactly that, creating shadows that reveal small but critical pits that would disappear under flat floodlighting. According to Palomba, “Most drones in confined spaces still do not have the quality of lighting we have. Very few can truly replicate that torch‑in‑hand technique.”
Autonomy As A Journey
When Palomba talks about autonomy, he does not mean fully hands‑off drones that replace inspectors. He describes a staged journey, not a simply a destination, where more of the inspection workflow becomes automated while humans remain central. Elios 3 already supports advanced software features such as repeat flights and the ability to resume inspections in large assets where a previous mission left off, which is critical for accurate comparison over time.
Flyability’s public roadmap reinforces that direction. Recent releases like Smart Return‑to‑Home and Return‑to‑Signal use real‑time LiDAR scans and the onboard autonomy engine to let the aircraft analyze its environment, make navigation decisions and return safely when video or radio links degrade. “With Smart Return‑to‑Home, the Elios 3 navigates the most complex indoor mazes. It is a major step toward fully autonomous operations,” Palomba noted.
The company explicitly positions Elios 3 as a professional indoor inspection platform that blends autonomy with human expertise, rather than chasing fully autonomous flights that ignore operational constraints. For asset owners, automation reduces pilot workload, improves repeatability, shortens learning curves for non-destructive testing (NDT) and inspection personnel and accelerates the creation of consistent datasets across fleets of assets.
Regulation Catching Up
Technology has raced ahead of regulation in many areas of autonomy, but confined‑space safety seems to be closing that gap. Palomba highlighted recent changes in California’s OSHA framework, specifically Title 8 CCR 1951 and 1956, which took effect on January 1, 2026. Those changes align construction‑sector confined‑space rules with the “gold standard” long applied to the energy sector by tightening requirements around classification, testing and rescue readiness.
Among other provisions, the updated rules require formal processes for determining whether spaces are permit‑required, mandate evaluation and entry verification testing for atmospheric conditions and call for written permits and trained standby rescue personnel before entry. For datacenter construction and other major infrastructure builds in California, that means confined‑space work must now meet safety expectations that look a lot like those in power generation and oil and gas.
Palomba stressed that the ultimate risk‑reduction move is to avoid putting people inside in the first place when technology can accomplish the reconnaissance. That principle is already embedded in UK law, where duty‑of‑care provisions require employers to use alternatives to human entry when such technology exists. If there is an alternative to human entry in confined spaces, the employer is legally obliged to use that technology. As regulators worldwide absorb the impact of drones like Elios 3, similar expectations may spread into other sector standards, insurance and litigation landscapes.
The Road Ahead For Autonomous Inspection
Looking forward, Flyability plans to deepen autonomy, expand software‑driven automation and push further into sectors such as data centers, power generation, nuclear, maritime and public safety where confined‑space risk intersects with high‑value assets. Repeatable missions, richer cloud‑based workflows and tighter integration of visual, LiDAR, UT, gas and radiation data will make Elios 3 not just an inspection tool but a core sensor in broader digital‑asset strategies.
At the same time, Flyability continues to grow its physical footprint, from Denver to Asia‑Pacific and planned expansion into Brazil, where the company is recruiting Portuguese‑speaking sales staff to support a growing customer base. That build‑out reflects the simple fact that confined‑space problems are global, and so is the demand for safer, more efficient ways to solve them.
In Palomba’s words, “the best is still ahead.” As regulations evolve and asset owners internalize both the human and financial costs of traditional confined‑space work, platforms like Elios 3 stand poised to shift from an “innovative option” to the expected practice in critical infrastructure.
All images are courtesy of Flyability.