Albatroz Engenharia celebrated its twentieth anniversary on February 21st with an innovation compared to previous years: instead of scheduling a different activity, we scheduled the default activity – a lunch – but with different people: we invited all our former colleagues to join the celebration.
It was not possible to contact everyone or gather everyone in Lisbon, as many are now scattered across distant countries, from Canada to the United Arab Emirates, including Brazil, Ireland, and Norway.
Even with those physically present and those who participated online and without lunch (clearly, the menu was a secondary motivation), it was possible to revisit these twenty years and try to understand what is common in this journey and in these people of such diverse ages and backgrounds that motivates them to reunite for a day. By going through these twenty years with those who were present and online, invoking those who were absent and their contributions, it is possible to reconstruct the genesis of Albatroz Engenharia – mentioned in the previous newsletter – a prehistory within the EDP Group, which will be discussed another time, and a story that began on February 21, 2006, which is briefly relived today, not chronologically but essentially :
What are the essential elements common throughout the 20 years?
What remains valid and unchanged over time? What differentiates the company in the market? The answers define the company’s culture and include at least 11 entries, very different in nature and whose only order was the course of conversations throughout the day.
1. A user interface for helicopters
The Power Line Maintenance Inspection [PLMI] flight interface , Albatroz Engenharia’s first product, has remained essentially the same since 2006 because it is simple, effective, and comprehensive. The original interface was designed based on the experience of colleagues from LABELEC (EDP Group) who flew with the first PLMI system. The design was tested and iterated on tablets operated with gloves, under intense sunlight, electromagnetic noise, and the need to minimize attention to the interface to maximize attention to the exterior of the helicopter, thus maximizing flight safety. It is an interface that can be used without looking.
By designing a PLMI interface to incorporate the four most common types of inspection: visual, thermographic, LiDAR distance measurement, and ultraviolet, in addition to having a specific inventory mode, Albatroz enabled the different inspection subsets requested by each client to “fit” into the matrix. Developed within a company with an international focus, it was designed from scratch with multi-language support.
The first implementation was entrusted to a young Mexican engineering graduate who came to Europe for the first time on an IAESTE internship. Naturally, the first beta versions were soon released in Portuguese, English, and Spanish; shortly after, PLMI appeared in French. Later, colleagues from Albatroz rewrote the code and added maps to track power lines in real time (2009-10). With these functions, the interface continues to work and is also used from unmanned ground or aerial vehicles.
2. “Customer attention” time
Following the first international sale – in Spain – Albatroz sent a marketing intern to the client to better understand the reasons for choosing the PLMI product. Being Spanish, she would therefore be able to empathize with both the Spanish and Portuguese sides, making her the ideal person to convey the true motivations of the clients in Madrid to Lisbon.
During the debriefing , our Spanish colleague listed the six reasons for the choice in this order: cost, cost/product relationship, engineering, customer service, marketing (contact), innovation.
When asked to rank them by importance, she didn’t hesitate for a second: ” customer service ” stood out from all the others.
Everyone at Albatroz knows that ” customer service ” takes time. One of Albatroz’s four cardinal values is proximity . In the lives of companies, as well as in the lives of people, whenever there is a close relationship, the amount of time spent on the relationship tends to take a back seat.
On the eve of its anniversary, Albatroz had been accompanying its clients and R&D partners on a stone pine project following the storms of early February. Proximity was more important than efficiency: the most important thing was to understand the reality on the ground.
” Customer service ” implies putting into practice a service logic from the recipient’s perspective. Sometimes, the service requires going even further than the client’s expressed wishes: since Albatroz Engenharia’s clients are business-to-business , it is often necessary to understand the impact of any decision or solution on the client’s client, or even on the client’s-client’s-client, because the last link in the chain will always be a human being, and that is what the Albatroz team has to think about.
3. Boots on the ground and hands on the equipment.
Field trips cost money. Field trips for foreign clients cost even more. Despite this harsh reality, Albatroz Engenharia has always followed business models where the cost of an individual trip is never an impediment to providing good on-site service. Whether incorporating these costs into the price, a maintenance contract, or a service provision agreement, whenever a client has an aircraft on the ground, you repair first and invoice later. Once, we went up the Pyrenees to install a PLMI system on a helicopter parked at a small heliport by the side of a mountain road in Andorra. Certainly, there would have been more accessible airstrips, but that was where the client needed support.
Field visits are the practical expression of proximity. Being alongside the client, learning to see their business and its difficulties through their eyes in the context in which they occur, leads us to understand much more than the specifications and what is left unsaid in an organized meeting. The functional requirements defined after field visits are more complete, denser in interrelationships, and more robust. Going into the field allows us to discover that what seemed absurd from the meeting room is understandable when viewed on-site. What often happens is that the functional merit or point of view differs among the various stakeholders. This gap between viewpoints is an opportunity for innovation and usually requires some R&D work; if it were trivial, the client would have arrived at the solution on their own. Albatroz’s approach is bottom -up : it arises from the needs of the field.
Another aspect of life in the field is that Albatroz Engenharia’s work doesn’t end with the design and project, nor even with the sale or delivery of a system or equipment. It only ends when we follow its installation and see the helicopter or some other system (even a computer server!) start up our onboard component, performing its function as expected. We accompany the client every mile of the way, and even that extra mile to the top of the mountain, when necessary.
4. The connection with the university
The link between the university and the market is the fingerprint or DNA mark of the founders of Albatroz Engenharia: knowing the university side, they wanted to make the leap to the market side but without breaking ties. Therefore, they created the company as a bridge with intense circulation between the two worlds. The office opened in March 2006, in April the first intern arrived, recommended by a European program, and in May the first protocol was signed with a department of the Instituto Superior Técnico. The first IAESTE intern arrived in July (see #1).
Since then, we’ve lost count of the number of interns we’ve hosted (more than 40?) in various fields, but always related to the company’s technologies or business. Several team members discovered the company as interns and wanted to stay. We inspired and co-supervised more than a dozen Master’s dissertations and sponsored a PhD Fellowship in a company for a colleague who developed an Autonomous Supervision System for Unmanned Aircraft for power line inspection. Some internships resulted in peer-reviewed scientific articles (see #9), and we supported students’ attendance at conferences to present them.
Why do we do this? Because it’s the most efficient way to “pollinate” the team with the latest discoveries and keep the company at the forefront of R&D, and because it demonstrates that it’s possible to conduct R&D and innovation in a business environment in Portugal.
5. LiDAR
Albatroz Engenharia was founded because its founders were familiar with LiDAR and used it to improve the flight safety of inspection helicopters and protect power lines and forests from harmful interactions between them. Thus, the Power Line Maintenance Inspection system was born. PLMI was the first product, designed for line inspections, but as early as 2007 the team was already applying its LiDAR knowledge to archaeology, modeling the Roman Galleries of Lisbon.
Since 2006, only two major solutions from Albatroz Engenharia have not involved LiDAR as the primary sensor: the LIONS project on operational risk analysis, created for the Rede Eléctrica Nacional [REN], and a project on productivity in stone pine forests for the Union for the Mediterranean Forest [UNAC]. Otherwise, LiDAR has been used handheld, on the back in a backpack, on a bicycle, in a car, in a helicopter, and in unmanned aerial vehicles. The only thing missing is putting it on the back of a pack animal, but that idea has already been considered.
Why do we like LiDAR so much? Because it’s complementary to imaging – and in the vast majority of applications we work with both simultaneously – and because it’s geometrically rigorous. For a team that originated in real-time mobile robotics, whose basic function is to navigate while avoiding collisions, having highly accurate numerical measurements is a primary value.
6. Adapting to the schedules of each team member.
Innovation work doesn’t work well with rigid schedules. R&D work, being more thorough and methodical, fits better, but experience shows that there’s a time to start but no time to stop. In such a company, flexibility is essential. Furthermore, most curious people extend their curiosity to various topics. From the beginning, Albatroz Engenharia has considered flexibility in schedules and workloads, according to the interests and availability of its members. Throughout their careers at Albatroz, team members have reduced or increased their workload to continue studying, take breaks for exams, take courses in other areas; some have even taken “courses” on motherhood and fatherhood, a real case of “lifelong learning” in a field where university education is not enough.
This close-knit approach makes team management more demanding and requires redundant capabilities, but we know that the most productive hours often occur outside the office, on a morning run or when thinking about a different topic. We continue to believe that it is worthwhile to seek mutual adaptation to the different phases of people’s lives and the company, and the feedback we hear from former colleagues corroborates this choice.
7. Curiosity and willingness to experiment
Curiosity is the cure for boredom. We don’t think people at Albatroz are bored, perhaps because they live with curiosity in action. In many cases, it’s colleagues who bring challenges to the company, and we seek to address them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but we always learn something. We understand that a methodical, long-term plan would lead to more consistent results, but the Albatroz bridge depends on support from both sides: the creators and the buyers. There are even cases where curiosity only transforms into a viable solution on the second attempt, and at least one case where it only worked on the third, nine years after the first field experience.
While failures may be frustrating at first, they quickly open up new horizons because we know there is no cure for curiosity.
8. Mathematics and logic as a foundation
“Are we 100% sure that this classification is correct?”
This is a common question in Albatroz’s daily work, whether it’s identifying a cork oak tree in a LiDAR point cloud or a visual defect in a power line. The answer, half-seriously, half-jokingly, is that if a result has a probability of 1 or 0, that is, if it is certain or impossible, then it is irrelevant to the business. Albatroz’s business depends on estimating and limiting uncertainties.
This doesn’t mean we gamble or rely on guesswork. All our solutions are based on the fundamental principles of the scientific method, including logic, the rationalities of mathematics and physics that lead to deductions of results, but also allow us to work backward through induction to understand the causes. For example, an important part of operational risk analysis – applied to the electrical grid as well as helicopter safety – is knowing how to distinguish between correlation and causation.
Only in recent years, with the approach of Artificial Intelligence systems, have we begun to accept that it is not always possible to trace back from effects to causes. In these cases, we reinforce the analysis of problems in increasingly simpler modules to limit the space of unknowns and the statistical characterization of each module to validate the results of the “black boxes,” reinforcing confidence in what we cannot induce and characterizing the “misbehaving” cases ( outliers ).
9. Publications and participation in conferences
No, secrecy is no longer the soul of the business. Albatroz Engenharia publishes articles, frequently participates in conferences, thematic weeks, exhibitions, and debates in a spirit of exchanging ideas – “cross-pollination” – with the aim of bringing cutting-edge scientific and technical knowledge closer to market needs. We have already published more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific articles, notably at the CIGRÉ and CIRED conferences on electrical networks and IEEE.
It may seem strange for a company to openly disclose its innovations. While there’s a chance we might help our potential competitors, we also benefit from what we learn from other participants, making the outcome positive; even better, sometimes there are even potential customers in the audience. Furthermore, if each answer gives rise to multiple questions, it becomes impossible to follow all the clues, and it’s better to listen to peers and understand what seems most promising, where the risks and differentiating elements lie, discover who has similar challenges, and exchange ideas.
The “trade of ideas” is the engine of discovery and the acceleration of innovation .
When a team embraces the challenge of creating an innovative solution, its members contribute cutting-edge elements from their respective fields of expertise. Some even speak, sometimes exaggerating, of “disruptive innovation.” However, as the years go by and the team focuses on its product, the “in-house” people tend to prefer incremental innovations, without questioning what they have already achieved. It then becomes useful to import ideas “from outside.”
The “cross-pollination” that occurs in meetings between scientists and innovators is the trigger – or the shock! – that challenges the team to expand horizons and take a new leap, because the only reliable prediction we have in the face of competition is that it will be unpredictable.
In 2006, we simulated a LiDAR mounted on a helicopter using an aluminum gantry. The LiDAR was real, and conference attendees “flew” over the model’s power lines, houses, and forests, “detected” vegetation anomalies in real time, and received the calculated report instantly! It was a live science demonstration that convinced all the skeptics.
10. Optimize the quality/price ratio
One of the biggest headaches in innovation is striking the right balance between quality and price, especially when designing a product or solution that doesn’t yet exist, for a nascent market that will only be entered years later. Proximity to customers allows for the early design stages to identify a set of operational requirements that make extreme quality and cost solutions viable or unviable: an inertial sensor with an initial warm-up time of 60 minutes might be fantastic for a ship but impractical for a helicopter; conversely, an inertial sensor without a Kalman filter has such noisy readings that it masks the small adjustment rotations of the vehicle. Optimization results from the operational scenario .
Of the three most common optimizations—quality, price, and value for money—Albatroz Engenharia opts, by default, for competitiveness tailored to the application. This choice results from three factors:
- We work in the asset maintenance sector, which is a typically regulated area with compressed costs in the name of public interest, where quality is only valued to the extent that it reduces total costs;
- When designing a customized solution for a client, it’s possible to incorporate the costs of the different stages of a process, and this moves us away from minimum capital costs that lead to higher operational costs (brooms are cheaper than vacuum cleaners, but have a smaller market share because they are less efficient).
- By vertically integrating solutions, it becomes possible to find multiple local optima between performance and total cost of ownership (capital costs + operating costs).
This is how Power Line Maintenance Inspection was adapted for helicopters with different service levels and for unmanned aircraft, using the same software but with different hardware , tailored to the value and other costs of the application.
Even within the realm of manned helicopters, different operational requirements and stages of technological development have led to different PLMI ( Personal Protective Equipment Module) hardware , while the software continuously evolves, maintaining compatibility with previous generations.
11. Knowledge transfer between businesses
Albatroz Engenharia didn’t want to be just a power line inspection company. Our purpose is to be a bridge between unknown worlds. We celebrate when the systems we design for power lines work in modeling dinosaur footprints or detecting irregularities in the ballast distribution of railway tracks. The interconnection of people and businesses is one of the pleasures of working at the company, and the curiosity that drives us (number 7) is the catalyst for many experiments that begin with “What if…?”
We are confident that among today’s “What if…?” or “Why not?” we will find tomorrow’s business opportunities.
Conclusion
It is reassuring to conclude that the four cardinal values of Albatroz Engenharia…
- proximity,
- interconnection of people, companies and knowledge,
- innovation and
- competitiveness by measure
…they arise as a consequence of business practice. They are not a declaration of good intentions fixed in a manual; they are a reflection of daily life over the last twenty years.