According to the company, the drone can make gas inspections go three times faster. The Environmental Protection Agency requires oil producers to monitor their fields for leaks, you see. And currently, what they do is send workers armed with infrared cameras to walk around their wells. Raven, with its laser-based sensors, can fly over the field for 40 minutes on a single charge and beam back data to an iPad on the ground. Even better, it can tell how bad the leak is, whereas the infrared camera can only detect its presence, not its severity. The drone is also loaded with custom software that allows it to plan its own flight and analyze the data it gathers.

GE will continue working on the project at its R&D Center in Oklahoma and will soon deploy its third Raven for testing. In the future, the machine might end up going head-to-head against the methane-sniffing drone NASA created, which was based on the sensor the Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed for use on Mars. Other than sniffing out gas leaks, the UAV's potential applications include inspecting hard-to-reach machineries and and keeping an eye on factory flare stacks.