Flying Into the Future

On any given day in Zurich, an autonomous drone might be threading its way between hospital rooftops carrying urgent blood samples, while a few kilometres away, a heat-resistant flying robot is navigating the interior of a cement kiln at temperatures that would melt conventional electronics. Welcome to Switzerland — a country that has quietly, and methodically, built itself into the most advanced drone ecosystem on the planet.

I have spent the past several weeks researching operators, regulators, and engineers across the Swiss drone landscape for an upcoming roadshow our team will embark upon there.

What I found was a story not just about clever machines, but about a deliberate ecosystem — one where pragmatic regulation, world-class research, and industrial ambition have converged to make drone operations in hazardous and complex environments not just possible, but routine. I also found a surprising thread connecting many of these operations: the persistent, human problem of knowing where your drone is and what is happening around it — a challenge that Anarky Labs is of course tackling with augmented reality.

From Laboratory Curiosity to Industrial Workhorse

The numbers alone tell a compelling story. Switzerland is home to over one hundred robotics companies, many of them concentrated in the Greater Zurich Area, which has earned the moniker "Silicon Valley of Robotics." The region is home to a dense network of drone manufacturers, component developers, and service providers — many of them spinoffs from ETH Zurich and EPFL, the country's two elite federal institutes of technology.

What's particularly striking is how many of these companies are focused not on consumer gadgets or aerial photography, but on hard industrial problems. Voliro, an ETH Zurich spinoff founded in 2019, has developed a drone with a patented tiltable-rotor system that can physically touch and interact with structures at any angle. Its Voliro T platform performs non-destructive testing on flare stacks, storage tanks, and wind turbines — tasks that previously required expensive scaffolding, rope access teams, and significant downtime. The company now counts more than forty customers across seventeen countries, including Chevron and Holcim, and has raised $23 million in Series A funding to scale operations globally.

Then there is Flyability, based in Lausanne, which has pioneered collision-tolerant drones for confined space inspections. Rather than trying to sense and avoid obstacles — an approach that struggles in the dark, cluttered environments found inside boilers, ballast tanks, and mine shafts — Flyability built a drone encased in a protective cage that simply bounces off walls and keeps flying. The Elios 3, its flagship platform, combines LiDAR-based 3D mapping with optical and thermal cameras, and is now deployed by over a thousand customers in more than sixty countries, from oil refineries in Texas to nuclear plants in France. Industrial giant LafargeHolcim selected Flyability as a key technology provider for its "Plants of Tomorrow" initiative, reporting 15 to 20 percent operational efficiency gains at certified operations.

And then, just weeks ago, a new entrant arrived: the FireDrone, a heat-resistant aerial robot born out of years of research at Empa, Switzerland's federal materials science laboratory.

The FireDrone can withstand temperatures of up to 200°C — roughly five times the limit of a conventional drone — thanks to a shell of polyimide aerogel insulation and an active internal cooling system. Now being commercialised through a joint Empa-EPFL spinoff led by David Häusermann and Fabian Wiesemüller, with CHF 150,000 in backing from Venture Kick, the FireDrone is designed to fly into burning buildings, toxic smoke clouds, and industrial kilns to deliver real-time thermal imagery and gas-sensor data to incident commanders.

It has already been tested at the Andelfingen firefighter training centre and the Holcim cement plant in Siggenthal — and its developers have their sights set on a far broader set of industrial use cases, from steelworks to waste incineration facilities.

Also worth noting is Flybotix, another Swiss startup based in Renens, whose dual-rotor ASIO X drone is engineered for long-duration inspections in confined spaces — from sewers to underground mines — with a design that doubles flight time compared to conventional quadcopters.

Seeing Without Being Seen: The Situational Awareness Challenge

What ties these disparate applications together is a shared, fundamental challenge: situational awareness. How does a pilot — or an autonomous system — know what is happening around the drone when the drone is deep inside a boiler, flying through smoke, or inspecting infrastructure kilometres away from the operator?

Each company has tackled this problem differently, and in doing so, has advanced the state of the art. Flyability's Elios 3 uses integrated LiDAR with SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) technology — powered by Ouster's OS0 sensor — to build a three-dimensional model of its environment in real time.

When the drone's video feed is lost — a common occurrence in complex enclosed structures — an automatic return-to-signal feature guides the aircraft back along its original trajectory until communication is restored. The drone effectively creates its own map as it flies, giving the pilot and the inspection team a live, evolving digital twin of the space being surveyed.

The FireDrone faces an even more acute version of this problem. GPS is simply unavailable inside buildings, tunnels, and covered industrial facilities. "GPS is not available in many of our operational scenarios," Fabian Wiesemüller has explained. "That's why we are developing pilot assistance and localisation systems that function reliably even without a satellite signal."

The goal is to make the technology usable by firefighters with minimal training — a significant design constraint that forces simplicity in the human interface even as the underlying autonomy grows more complex.

Voliro's approach is different again. Because its drones make physical contact with the structures they are inspecting, spatial accuracy is paramount. The Voliro T uses AI-assisted autonomy and automated flight modes to maintain stable, controlled contact with curved or sloped surfaces — a feat that requires constant real-time adjustment to wind, surface angle, and drone orientation. The data it collects, from ultrasonic thickness measurements to pulsed eddy current readings, is stored on the drone and then uploaded for analysis, providing asset owners with actionable intelligence about structural integrity without ever putting a human inspector at height.

As Voliro's partner Constellation Clearsight in the US has put it, the technology provides "actionable insights about the structural integrity of equipment without risking the safety of a human inspector."

Across all of these platforms, the trend is clear: the locus of intelligence is shifting from the pilot to the drone itself. Situational awareness is becoming less about what a human can see through a live camera feed, and more about what the machine can perceive, interpret, and act upon autonomously.

But there remains a critical gap: the human pilot still needs to understand where their drone is, what it is doing, and what is around it — especially in the transitional phases of flight, during handovers, and whenever something goes wrong. That gap is exactly where augmented reality comes in.

The AR Layer: Bridging the Pilot's Blind Spot

This is the problem that Anarky Labs has set out to solve. Their patented product, AirHUD™, is the world's first true heads-up display for drone pilots. Using augmented reality glasses such as Meta Quest 3, AirHUD™ overlays real-time telemetry, 3D terrain maps, airspace boundaries, and the drone's precise position directly into the pilot's field of vision — as holographic indicators suspended in the sky above them. The pilot no longer has to look down at a controller screen and then back up to find the drone; the data is where the drone is.

The implications for the Swiss industrial drone companies I investigated are significant and specific.

Consider Voliro's operations on flare stacks or wind turbines. The pilot must position a drone precisely enough to make physical contact with a structure, often at considerable height and distance. Losing visual reference — even momentarily — can jeopardise both the inspection and the aircraft. AirHUD's ability to show the drone's exact position relative to structures, even when the aircraft is partially obscured by the asset itself, could provide Voliro's pilots with a continuous spatial reference that their controller screen alone cannot offer. As Stephen Sutton of FlyBy Guys, an AirHUD partner, has put it: "When you are doing industrial inspections, being able to see the drone constantly is really important — you're always making sure that you are a sufficient distance from turbines, or the right distance from the mast."

For Flyability and Flybotix, the use case shifts. Their drones operate inside confined spaces where the pilot typically cannot see the aircraft at all. But the challenge doesn't end at the entrance to the boiler or the mine shaft. Before the drone enters, and after it exits, the pilot still needs to navigate open airspace around complex industrial sites — often near cranes, chimneys, and other infrastructure. AirHUD's augmented overlay of obstacles, building distances, and no-fly zones can turn those transitional phases from high-risk moments into routine manoeuvres. The system's ability to display the drone's position even behind buildings, in fog, or in darkness is directly relevant to the kinds of industrial environments where Flyability and Flybotix operate — cement plants, power stations, and underground facilities where visibility is rarely guaranteed.

The FireDrone team faces what may be the most demanding scenario of all. Their pilots will be fire crews operating under extreme pressure, often at night, in smoke-filled conditions, around collapsing structures. Wiesemüller has spoken about the need for pilot assistance that works without GPS. AirHUD™ means pilots can at all times reliably see and understand where the drone is, even behind the obscuring smoke clouds. When this is combined with AirHUD™ bird’s eye views of the operation of the whole team, the situational awareness is raised to totally new levels.

For Matternet's long-range BVLOS delivery operations, the application is different again. Their drones fly autonomously over a five-kilometre route between hospitals, monitored from a remote mission control centre. But what about the ground-based spotters and safety observers who may be stationed along the route? AirHUD is already being explored for exactly this kind of extended visual line of sight (EVLOS) and BVLOS workflow — providing observers with a heads-up display that pinpoints the drone in the sky at distances where the naked eye would lose it entirely. One user has estimated that AirHUD could deliver a 40% efficiency gain per flight in such operations.

Anarky Labs also offers AirSkill, a VR-based drone flight simulator that allows pilots to train in realistic scenarios without risking equipment or incurring field costs. For companies like Voliro and Flyability that deploy globally and must qualify pilots across dozens of countries, the ability to train safely, repeatedly, and weather-independently is a practical advantage — particularly when the cost of a mistake during a live industrial inspection can run into hundreds of thousands of francs in downtime.

Beyond Visual Line of Sight: Where the Real Value Begins

If there is a single regulatory concept that unlocks the full economic potential of industrial drones, it is BVLOS — Beyond Visual Line of Sight. Under standard rules, a drone pilot must maintain direct visual contact with the aircraft at all times, which severely limits range and, consequently, the scope of operations. BVLOS operations allow drones to fly beyond that visual envelope, often over distances of several kilometres, opening up use cases from long-range pipeline inspection to autonomous urban delivery.

Switzerland has been at the forefront of BVLOS authorisation. In 2017, Matternet became the first company in the world to be authorised for commercial BVLOS drone logistics operations over a city, when it began transporting medical laboratory samples for the EOC Hospital in Lugano in partnership with Swiss Post. That programme expanded to Zurich, where Matternet now operates a five-kilometre autonomous BVLOS route connecting the Triemli and Waid hospitals — the longest urban drone delivery route over a major city anywhere in the world. A flight that replaces a forty-five-minute road courier journey takes just seven minutes by drone, with the entire operation supervised remotely from a mission control centre in Zurich.

These are not proof-of-concept demonstrations. Between 2017 and 2022, Swiss Post's drone programme completed thousands of commercial flights. When Swiss Post pivoted its strategy in late 2022, Matternet took over the operations directly, and its Swiss subsidiary subsequently received the first Light UAS Operator Certificate from FOCA for advanced drone operations — a credential that streamlines future approvals and signals a maturing regulatory framework.

For industrial operators, the implications are significant. BVLOS-capable drones can survey kilometres of high-voltage power lines, inspect rail infrastructure across entire networks, or monitor distributed industrial sites without requiring a human observer at every waypoint. Wingtra, another Zurich-based company, manufactures fixed-wing VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) drones designed for aerial surveying that can cover vast areas in a single flight — a capability that one user described as providing a dramatic leap in situational awareness compared to traditional methods. Wingtra has also partnered with 3DR to offer comprehensive aerial surveying solutions for mine operators. For Wingtra's long-range survey missions, where the aircraft can be kilometres from the launch point, tools like AirHUD could provide the ground pilot or observer with continuous spatial awareness of the drone's position relative to terrain and airspace boundaries — precisely the kind of information that regulators require for BVLOS authorisation under EASA's framework.

The Regulatory Edge: FOCA, EASA, and the U-Space Vision

None of this would be possible without a regulatory environment that is both rigorous and genuinely supportive of innovation. Switzerland's Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA) has been the critical enabler.

Since January 2023, Switzerland has adopted the European Union's drone regulations under EASA (the European Aviation Safety Agency), introducing the familiar Open, Specific, and Certified category framework. This alignment was strategic: it means that a drone certified in Switzerland can, in principle, operate under the same rules across the entire EU and EEA — a significant advantage for Swiss companies with international ambitions. But Switzerland has also retained the ability to add its own national rules where justified, and FOCA has used this flexibility to create an unusually welcoming environment for advanced operations. As Matternet's founder Andreas Raptopoulos has noted, FOCA "has been instrumental in developing a world-leading regulatory framework" for safe and effective drone operations.

For BVLOS and other higher-risk operations that fall into the Specific category, FOCA applies the JARUS SORA (Specific Operations Risk Assessment) methodology, evaluating each application on a case-by-case basis. Standard procedures exist for common scenarios, while more complex operations require detailed risk analysis and emergency procedures. The processing is thorough but not prohibitively slow — standard permits typically take around four weeks, while complex SORA-based applications may take three months. Critically, FOCA has been willing to grant approvals that other national authorities have been far more cautious about, including urban BVLOS operations over populated areas.

The other piece of the infrastructure puzzle is U-Space — Europe's vision for a digital drone traffic management system. Skyguide, Switzerland's air navigation service provider, has been a pioneer here. In partnership with AirMap, Skyguide deployed the first nationwide U-Space services in Europe, creating a digital layer that gives drone operators real-time information about airspace restrictions, enables automated flight authorisation requests, and provides live traffic awareness that integrates both manned and unmanned aircraft on a single dashboard. The nationwide rollout of digital authorisation has made it, in Skyguide's own words, "faster, safer, and easier for UAS operators to fly in controlled airspace without increasing air traffic control workload."

For industrial drone operators, U-Space is more than a convenience — it is the foundational infrastructure that will enable routine, scaled BVLOS operations in shared airspace. Without it, every flight in controlled airspace is an administrative exercise; with it, the path to automated, high-frequency drone operations becomes viable. And as that path opens, tools like AirHUD — which can display airspace classification and restriction zones as AR overlays directly in the pilot's line of sight — become increasingly important in helping operators comply with dynamic airspace rules without burying their heads in a controller screen.

What Comes Next

Standing back, what is remarkable about the Swiss drone ecosystem is not any single technology or company, but the deliberate way in which the pieces fit together. World-class universities produce the research. Spinoffs commercialise it. A pragmatic regulator creates the conditions for real-world testing and deployment. An air navigation service provider builds the digital infrastructure to manage the resulting traffic. And a dense network of industrial partners — from Holcim's cement plants to Zurich's municipal hospitals — provides the proving grounds where theory meets practice.

The challenges ahead are real. Scaling BVLOS operations will require further regulatory harmonisation across borders, more robust detect-and-avoid technology, and cybersecurity frameworks that can protect increasingly autonomous systems from interference. The workforce question is also pressing: as drones take over inspection tasks traditionally performed by rope-access technicians and scaffolding crews, the industry will need pilots, data analysts, and maintenance engineers with new skill sets — and companies like Anarky Labs, with their AirSkill VR training platform, are already building the tools to develop those competencies faster and more safely than traditional field training allows.

But if any country is positioned to navigate these challenges, it is Switzerland. The infrastructure is in place, the regulatory culture favours measured progress over paralysis, and the pipeline of innovation from labs like Empa, ETH Zurich, and EPFL shows no sign of slowing. The drones are already flying. The question now is how far, and how fast, the rest of the world follows — and whether the pilots behind the controls will have the augmented eyes to keep up.