Monday April 15, the start-up HyLight, which designs an airship powered by hydrogen, announced, two years after its creation, a fundraising of 3.7 million euros from venture capital companies and business angels. This autonomous aircraft, twelve meters long and two meters wide, will carry cameras and sensors to allow infrastructure operators to check the state of their installations, such as power lines, pipelines or roads. Special feature: it is decarbonized, and therefore does not emit greenhouse gases.
“Initially, we wanted to design a drone that could inspect any type of infrastructure from the air, capable of flying for a long time and, above all, with zero emissions”says HyLight manager Martin Bocken, 25, one of the co-founders of the company launched in 2022 upon leaving the University of Technology of Troyes (Aube).
Very quickly, for reasons of weight, the idea of the drone was discarded, in favor of a lighter helium airship, capable of flying for up to ten hours straight and covering 350 kilometers thanks to its battery. hydrogen fuel. In addition, it is easily transportable to the areas to be inspected.
Recruitment of specialists
Six prototypes of this airship, called HighLighter, which can carry ten kilos of equipment, have been developed. An experiment has been carried out for a year in Nord-Pas-de-Calais with Enedis, a subsidiary of EDF, to control its power lines and ensure preventive maintenance.
Based in Essonne, on air base 217 in Brétigny-sur-Orge, the young company intends to continue its development thanks to fundraising. It plans to strengthen its workforce – which will increase from ten people to around fifteen at the end of 2024 and to twenty-five in 2025 – by recruiting specialists in various fields, such as embedded systems. It also intends to extend its activities to monitoring forests and changes in sea levels.
These autonomous airships, presented as more environmentally friendly devices than drones, helicopters and satellites, are only just beginning. In October 2020, RTE, the electricity transmission network, tested the Diridrone designed by CNIM Air Space, without going further, ultimately preferring drones, in addition to its fleet of helicopters, for maintenance and monitoring of high and very high voltage lines. This airship project has since been abandoned by its designers, whose company was taken over by the Toulouse space equipment manufacturer Hemeria.
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