Rome, June 10, 2025 - ROAD - ‘Rome Advanced District’, a network of companies formed by Eni, Gruppo FS, Autostrade per l'Italia, Acea, Bridgestone and Nextchem (Maire) announces the signing of a testing agreement with Balloon Tech Co., a San Francisco-based US startup specialising in the development of balloons equipped with the latest generation of zero-emission sensors in the land monitoring sector.

The agreement is part of the activities launched by ROAD, the technology hub in the Gazometro area of Roma Ostiense dedicated to the development of supply chain innovations in smart cities and smart mobility.

Within smart cities, critical infrastructures (roads, railways, plants, pipelines) are in fact one of the elements of greatest attention from the point of view of reliability and safety, so it is essential to manage their monitoring in real time.

The technology developed by Balloon Tech Co., used for the first time in Italy, is able to operate in ‘unmanned’ mode up to an altitude of 20,000 metres.

In particular, being able to support a load of up to 15 kg and enabling a varied and customised combination of on-board sensors, it is able to provide high-resolution images and near real-time data and cover a large monitoring area with a major advantage in terms of cost-effectiveness compared to comparable technologies.

The assets being monitored during the overflight phase will focus on sites of interest to the FS Group and Eni.

Regarding the signing of the agreement, Daniele Pes, Head of Partnership & IP Valorization of the FS Group, said ‘the experimentation is aimed at assessing the technical feasibility and economic sustainability of alternative solutions to drones and satellites; the collaboration with ROAD gives us new opportunities to gain concrete experience with cutting-edge technologies of interest to the Group’.

For ROAD, ‘the trial is the second technological achievement of the Network since its establishment,’ says Mattia Voltaggio, ROAD's Programme Manager Officer. ‘As was already the case for air quality monitoring, the inspection of critical infrastructures - gas pipelines, aqueducts, bridges, motorways - also turned out to be a common research topic for the ROAD companies, confirming the underlying collaborative model: shortening the time of scouting for technological solutions, thus also reducing application costs’.