Aeronautical engineers Javier Losada and Juan Pan, both with a solid professional career behind them, had been looking for 10 years to create a company based on drones and during the pandemic they decided to investigate what would be the best strategy. The result of that process was the germ of Aguia.

"In Aguia we apply artificial intelligence to analyze defects in road pavement, through images obtained by drones. We provide a pavement evaluation based on visual inspection, recovering an ASTM (international standards organization) method that had not been used regularly for decades, due to its high execution costs," explain those responsible.

Thanks to their technology, they detect all cracks and potholes in the pavement, generating a report on the general condition of the wearing course. In addition, they provide the images and, almost more importantly, the measurement of lengths and areas of the defects, allowing a detailed analysis and follow-up on the evolution of the defects. "All this information we can export to formats that can be integrated into the customers' digital twins. We can produce reports for thousands of kilometers of roads, detecting cracks of only a few centimeters. To date, we have not found anything similar on the global market," they emphasize.

Aguia was one of the projects accelerated in the incubation itinerary in the IV edition of the Business Factory Aero, the vertical accelerator created in the context of the Civil UAVs Initiative program of the Xunta de Galicia, which seeks to promote the development of innovative companies in the Galician aerospace sector. "We needed a definitive boost to start the company's activity, as well as to get to know the Galician ecosystem around UAS," they explain. "BFAero IV has provided us with the opportunity to hire local talent in Galician universities, as well as conducting a system test for the Axencia Galega de Infraestructuras (AXI), generating our first commercially viable product, the SPA (Smart Pavement Analytics) V1.0", they continue.

Currently, its main challenge is to commercialize SPA V1.0, as well as to obtain new functionalities that will make it an unbeatable product for visual road inspection.