Drone station computer software#

The trials so far include the remote inspection of Sellafield’s nuclear site, the rail infrastructure governed by Network Rail, and Vodafone’s telecommunications network. McKenna says this test flight in Nottinghamshire was a step towards developing a command and control system that’s going to allow for autonomous aerial vehicles to be approved on a large scale.

Drone station computer software#

Instead of relying on potentially inaccurate or outdated historical data from asset design files, Google Maps, or satellite imagery, the software captures its own from scratch, and will evolve in real time throughout the drone’s mission. Using information gathered from six on-board sensors-two LIDAR, three fish-eye cameras, and an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit)-it creates its own 3D world that it then presents on a computer screen, along with a live videostream from the cameras. Sees.ai designed a drone software that works in a similar way as autonomous cars. “There are real signs that operators are steadily moving away from helicopters,” Max Hjalmarsson, the company’s cofounder and CEO, says. Three of Sweden’s core electricity distributors have also recently signed contracts with Airpelago, another company that flies automated drones, and have committed to exclusive use of automated drones for inspection over the next two years. A key part of the inspection is identifying vegetation that may have fallen on the grid during strong winds and storms. The system the company uses is tailored to speed and scalability in that it flies a minimum of 15 meters over the top of the grid for a “broad inspection,” says the company’s COO, Jimmy Bostrøm, rather than inspecting each pylon individually. In Norway, utility company Agder Energi Nett announced in April 2021 that it will rely exclusively on automated drones, mostly flown by KVS Technologies, to monitor its power grid. Other countries have been working on similar efforts: Last year, the Florida Power and Light company used automated drones manufactured by Israeli company Percepto to detect problems in the power grid after hurricanes. “What we’re doing is sending a super high-level instruction to the drone, like ‘Go to that pylon,’ and the drone is using its own intelligence to understand where the pylon is, where the parts of the pylon are that need to be imaged, and then it organizes its own route to the data capture itself,” says Sees.ai founder John McKenna, whose company was behind the drone test.

By the time it had landed, it had already sent the photos to be analyzed for corrosion by an AI-powered system. After only six minutes, the drone returned to the ground to a round of applause. Whizzing around, the drone took 65 photos that documented the condition of the pylon’s steel arms, fittings, and conductors. Assuming the software was working, a drone was about to inspect a pylon from a few meters away, maneuvered not by a nearby pilot but a computer in a control station hundreds of meters away. They were there to test a drone piloting software that they hoped could one day be in charge of maintaining the high-voltage pylons that transmit electricity across the country.

In March, a troop of engineers gathered in an unkept green field in rural Nottinghamshire, England.