Nanoveu Delivers up to 51% Efficiency Gains in ECS-DoT Drone Trials

Nanoveu (ASX: NVU) has recorded peak cruise efficiency gains of 51% in second-phase live drone trials of its ECS-DoT control technology across more complex flight paths and higher speeds.

Testing used irregular polygon, sinusoidal, and dense-zigzag routes incorporating sharp turns, diagonal crossings, and repeated direction changes designed to better reflect commercial drone operations.

The latest results surpassed the 27.8% peak improvement achieved during first-phase testing on simpler routes and showed average efficiency gains increasing from 5.7% at 3m/s to 48.5% at 7m/s across all three trajectories.

The strongest result came on the most complex 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, which was common to both phases of testing, the complex routes produced gains of 33.2% to 40.7% compared with the 27.8% peak recorded on simpler first-phase patterns.

Speed Control Drives Gains

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 found ECS-DoT held cruise speed more closely 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.

ECS-DoT adjusts drone speed approximately every 15 milliseconds through a 64Hz control loop while consuming less than 10mW of total system power.

This allows the technology to identify and maintain the aerodynamic optimum for each flight path without additional battery capacity, hardware modifications, cloud reliance, or external computation.

Commercial Applications in Focus

The flight patterns were designed to represent operating conditions encountered in urban reconnaissance, precision agriculture, infrastructure inspection, perimeter surveillance, and last-mile delivery.

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.

"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,” Spinoff Robotics chief executive officer Dr Tan Chee How added.

“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."