What is working now?

[BryanD]

I reached out to Duke Energy locally to video there new recruits training on poles. Stopped by several times for a follow up. no response

AH-1G I feel you pain. I have a foot in the door (I work there) and am having more trouble getting responses as time goes on. Our UAS department is only about a year old. They are, in my opinion, understaffed and are probably getting hammered with requests. Last April I met in person with the guy that, since our meeting, was named the Manager of our UAS Department. But since I got my certification last July responses from him are slow or not at all.

So the UAS Department here is new and I think they are focused on getting things set up internally. I do know there are provisions for using external contractors in their plan. But knowing how safety conscious Duke is, I am guessing that they will want to get our own house in order before hiring external contractors. So be patient and keep plugging away - that is what I am doing.

 

[Mattdbal]

I haven't stopped by this site in quite some time, but I figured I would catch up.

Currently, the interest on UAS from our company has been put on the back burner. There are always cases where I would love to have a M210 with a good zooming camera, but unfortunately that still hasn't happened yet for me. I have taken the drone out a few times over the past few months, but haven't really had enough time to really focus on it. We do not have a UAS department yet, (WEC Energy) and I believe I am one of the only in-house operator besides another from my group. I'll have to dive back into it some more when I have time. It would be cool to have an actual UAS department though but I doubt that'll ever happen..

 

[Herc]

P4P using Lume Cubes for lighting inside a wall fired, 680 MW coal boiler. @BigAl07 has already seen this on the Phantom Pilots site.

Utility tried to self perform this work and crashed their P3P in the boiler. Because I performed some work for them on a large capital project a couple of years ago, I already knew the plant general manager so that I could ask for his permission to shoot his burners the next time that they LOTO'd the boiler.

They had the throat scaffolded because they were working on a tube leak, but I think that I could do this inspection without having to enter the boiler. I used a 6' USB cord so that the VO could hold the ipad and verify that I got the shot with each pass over the burners and give me course guidance to frame the shot.

My concern would be if they came down for a forced outage and tried to rush a UAV in too soon that it would be hard to fly with the chimney effect. They had the ID fan dampers closed for this shoot and that probably helped even in this 'cold' boiler environment.

BTW, I have an Inspire 2 but didn't want to risk it in this environment; retrospectively I should have purchased a M210 and would have a thermal capability. Like @breid1 I don't know how I would feel about rolling back to an Inspire 1 just to get the IR capability.

 

[Philippe]

Hello All,

Here is a contact you should investigate.
It's a french start-up that developped an application to control DJI drone to make inspections.
Electric lines, Wind turbines and many other technical inspections.
They have an office in SanFrancisco CA and looking to develop business in the US.
Sterblue - Automatic industrial inspections
I'm working with them on wind turbines. it's one of the first application on the market.
Contact them they are motivated and properly engineers educated...

Philippe

 

[HawkView]

Thank you for the info! Looking for as much info as I can find on how to present actionable data to local power coops to make it worth it for them to consider using a drone service provider. I have been looking at Scopito (in Denmark) for reporting,

DRONE OPERATORS - SCOPITO

Hello All,
Here is a contact you should investigate.
It's a french start-up that developped an application to control DJI drone to make inspections.
Electric lines, Wind turbines and many other technical inspections.
They have an office in SanFrancisco CA and looking to develop business in the US.
Sterblue - Automatic industrial inspections
I'm working with them on wind turbines. it's one of the first application on the market.
Contact them they are motivated and properly engineers educated...
Philippe

 

[Philippe]

Scopito is a platform
"Scopito is a cloud-based software platform designed to store, analyze and share large amounts of image-based inspection data."
So this is not a solution will help you to fly your drone around the turbine.
You can try to fly manual and will see it is stressful.
That's why Sterblue developped an application to control DJI drone around turbines. it's the only one I know so far. They have a cloud as well and proper online platform.

You can develop an application to do exactly what you want. I tried and I gave up...
I did lots of research, that's why I'm on this forum.
There are more drone experiments about wind turbines than proper drone inspections. it's still new business.
Keep on your Idees...
Philippe

 

[nicolas]

Hi everyone,

Thanks Philippe for introducing Sterblue here ! I'm one of the co-founder so I wanted to give you some further insights in what we do.

Sterblue has developed an app and an online platform for drone operators allowing automatic inspections of power lines / wind turbines and delivery of high quality reports to your customers.

This is made easy through a 3 step process :

• You log on our online platform. You select on a kind of google map the asset you want to inspect. The platform computes the inspection mission for the drone (optimal trajectory, where to take pictures, camera settings etc.)
  
  
• On our iOs app, you select the mission to be executed. You start the mission, the drone performs it's inspection automatically (if necessary the pilot can gain back control at any point at the simple push of a button on the controller). Flight automation allows you being (much) more productive, keeping safety distances to the obstacles and capturing 100% of the asset with high resolution pictures.
  
  
• You upload the images on our platform. The online platform allows storing your pictures but above all, by merging flight data and defects detections from AI and expert, it allows generating automatically a very precise inspection report.

We are compatible with all DJI drones but for some asset, the expected picture quality is very important and high end drones need to be used (M210 RTK for wind turbines).

I attach a screenshot of the mission preparation interface. The trajectory (color path) and the actions to be performed by the drone are automatically computed after selecting the tower to be inspected.

We are now in beta. In case you are performing UAV flights for power lines or wind turbines do not hesitate me to send me a message. We are looking for drone operators to deploy our solution !

 

[BigAl07]

Hello Nicolas. Thanks for the phone call today.

 

[MedicFL1]

Florida Power and Light (FPL) have a Fleet also. They range from Matrice 210's to Inspire 1 v2's and are ruching to install Solar Fields throughout their territory. They have an in-house program and are difficult to "get on" with. BUT they, as others have, created Partner programs. So don't get discouraged, try and get on a stand by list if that is possible where you live.
Train whenever you can around this outliers as Electro mechanical interference is a huge problem for many UAV's.