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LONG RANGE PLANNER

Long-range drones mission planner to enhance power line digitization

COMPANY
FuVeX
DOMAIN
Energy
COUNTRY
Spain
YEAR
2021

DESCRIPTION

Our goal in this project is precisely to develop a mission planner system to automatically calculate the flight path of these operations.

Over 5 million kilometers of European power lines must be inspected to ensure its good status. To perform these inspection operations, manned helicopters continue to be used although they are expensive (3.000 €/hour), have human risks and are pollutant. Long range drones can replace manned helicopters but one of the main challenges is the mission planning: how to ensure safety and simultaneously acquire useful data of the power lines performing a 20 km. operation.

Experiment progress

The end goal of this system is to enable the deployment of long range drones inspecting power lines as it is currently limited by regulations. The main result of the experiment is a working prototype of a software to plan long range drone operations to perform long range power line inspections.

Main Results of the 1st stage of the programme: Currently is being deployed in real operations by FuVeX’s flight teams.

Main Objectives

Boost the digitalization of power lines through long range drones

Main innovations

The main innovation of this project is the development of a software that automatically calculates the flight route to perform power line inspection with long range drones. The main innovation is that it aggregates all the information to  safely plan a long range drone mission taking into account:

  • Communications ground control station – drone.
  • Sensor orientation to acquire the required data.
  • Safety features such emergency landing sites.
Impacts
  • Up to 90% cost reduction.
  • Digitizing the medium voltage grid.
  • Eliminating human risks.
  • Eliminating pollution
Key Exploitable Results (KERS)

The Key Exploitable Result of this experiment are:

  • Up to 37,5% increased efficiency in data acquisition. 
  • Up to 67,7% increased service availability. 
Technical KPIS

KP1 - Time required to plan complex operations. KP2 - Flights cancelled due to lack of communications. KP3 - Onsite mission replanning. KP4 -Data captured per normalized workday.

COMPANY INFO

In FuVeX our vision is to lead the current autonomous aircraft revolution. To do so, our current mission is to replace manned helicopters in power line inspections