Nanoveu Drone Software Hits 51% Efficiency Gain in Complex Routes

Nanoveu (ASX: NVU) recorded peak cruise efficiency gains of 51% in second-phase live drone trials of its ECS-DoT control technology, the company said. The tests used irregular polygon, sinusoidal, and dense-zigzag routes with sharp turns and repeated direction changes, designed to reflect commercial operations.

The latest results surpassed the 27.8% peak improvement from first-phase testing on simpler routes. Average efficiency gains rose from 5.7% at 3m/s to 48.5% at 7m/s across all three trajectories. The strongest result came on the dense-zigzag path at 7m/s, where ECS-DoT outperformed the baseline autopilot by 50.5% on the irregular polygon, 44% on the sinusoidal path, and 51% on the dense zigzag.

At 6m/s, a speed common to both phases, the complex routes produced gains of 33.2% to 40.7%, compared with the 27.8% peak on simpler first-phase patterns. The controlled trials used identical flight paths and speed profiles for baseline and ECS-DoT flights, with a total airborne mass of 2.8kg at an altitude of 3.5m.

Flight log analysis showed ECS-DoT held cruise speed closer to its target, while the conventional autopilot produced wider speed variations through turns, acceleration, and deceleration. The system uses onboard AI and a trained surrogate power model to predict energy consumption from the drone’s speed, heading, and flight conditions. It adjusts speed approximately every 15 milliseconds through a 64Hz control loop while consuming less than 10mW of total system power.

Embedded AI Systems founder Dr Mohamed M. Sabry Aly said the widening performance gap was the source of the technology’s value. “What changes with more complex paths is that the baseline gets worse, and ECS-DoT does not,” he said.

Spinoff Robotics chief executive officer Dr Tan Chee How added: “A 51% efficiency gain on a real-world flight path is not an incremental improvement–it is a fundamental shift in what is achievable through software and AI control alone.”

“What this data shows is that the bigger gains were always in the control layer, [and] ECS-DoT is now demonstrating that on the most demanding paths operators actually fly, not simplified test grids,” he said.

The flight patterns were designed to represent operating conditions encountered in urban reconnaissance, precision agriculture, infrastructure inspection, perimeter surveillance, and last-mile delivery. The technology requires no additional battery capacity, hardware modifications, cloud reliance, or external computation.