Enterprise Drone Inspection: Picking the Right Platform

There is a good chance that various inspection programs will have varying standards for the data quality. Whoever has to receive an inspection report and either confirm acceptance or take remedial action is the consumer of the data. This individual provides the real requirements for a dataset. To provide operators with context as they evaluate the level of quality that will be required to scale their drone inspection programs, Skydio has compiled key requirements from anonymized sets of customers in the various industries that have adopted drones for inspection. These industries include agriculture, construction, energy, and more.

The Solutions Engineering team at Skydio works with drone projects daily to comprehend and record these programs' needs and ensure that our clients are provided with the best possible drone operations. They have helped contribute to the documentation of the needs that are customary for a variety of different sectors.

Achieving the Goals Set by Transportation Inspection Standards

When assessing their transmission and distribution networks, utilities have anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of towers to check for damage that might result in a loss of power or fire. Due to the great distance between each tower, maximizing efficiency (both in speed and minimizing the need for rework) is extremely necessary. Utility inspectors are responsible for inspecting for rust, loose bolts, and other forms of damage; however, this kind of damage is often measured in centimeters rather than millimeters, as is the case when looking for minute fractures in concrete.

In addition, while it is important, keeping a complete library of 3D models is difficult to achieve at the level of scale that utility inspectors deal with throughout their whole asset bases. This is a challenge for utility inspectors. As a result, a picture collection that is both comprehensive and detailed may serve as an adequate output. Nevertheless, the tools customarily used for 3D modeling may help ensure that the photoset is entirely thorough, giving coverage that is both complete and redundant of the asset. Since the shots will not need to be stitched together, these tools may be configured to capture pictures with less overlap, allowing increased productivity in the aforementioned use scenarios.

The comparison shown provides several intriguing insights that are significant for teams attempting to choose the appropriate camera system for their inspection requirements. Customers should be sure to compare cameras at GSDs equally since this may be changed by flying closer or farther away from the subject. Therefore, Skydio makes sure to account for GSD so that readers may better understand how the quality of the camera tuning will affect the picture outputs that are made accessible to their teams.

Keeping An Eye On The Future

The data product is the essential output of a drone program, and producing a meaningful dataset may assist a drone program in reaching scale inside a huge company full of consumers of that data. As a result, Skydio urges people who fly drones to collaborate with their downstream coworkers to ensure that the drones they buy can create adequate datasets that are accurate enough to satisfy the standards for accuracy. The techniques described in this white paper may assist operators in shifting their emphasis away from the technical specifications of the hardware and more toward the outputs that the system can produce. Taking this course of action increases the likelihood of success for a business.

Download Skydio's whitepaper to learn more about Enterprise Drone Inspection Services only on Whitepapers Online.