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.
Boost the digitalization of power lines through long range drones
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.
- Up to 90% cost reduction.
- Digitizing the medium voltage grid.
- Eliminating human risks.
- Eliminating pollution
The Key Exploitable Result of this experiment are:
- Up to 37,5% increased efficiency in data acquisition.
- Up to 67,7% increased service availability.
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.
