Cell-level monitoring, thermal management and CAN integration for an operator losing packs early and, occasionally, losing confidence mid-flight.
Sector: Commercial operator, cold-climate operations
The constraint
Once it is up there, it is too late to discover the battery cannot finish the job. There is no pulling over and no second opinion — whatever the pack is going to do it has already decided, and the only question is whether anyone knew in time to act.
The operator flies in the cold. Packs that looked healthy on the ground were unable to deliver demanded current once cold-soaked, and pack service life was falling well short of expectation — with no visibility into why, because the only telemetry available was pack voltage.
Pack voltage tells you almost nothing until it is too late to act.
What we did
We built power packs that know their own condition: per-cell monitoring, temperature sensing distributed across the pack rather than at one convenient point, and active thermal management across the real operating range instead of the datasheet range.
State of health is tracked across cycles, so degradation is visible as a trend long before it becomes an incident. Everything is published over CAN, so the vehicle and the ground station see the same data and the flight controller can make decisions on measured capacity rather than nominal capacity.
The behaviour we cared most about is the warning: the pack should say it cannot support the next demand before that demand is made, not while failing to meet it.
