The Future of Utility Inspections

The power generation industry faces multiple obstacles to delivering critical energy services reliably and consistently every day, and even more vitally during emergencies. Unmanned aircraft have greatly accelerated routine and emergency inspections of structures and lines. Regardless of the distance, danger, or difficult conditions they face, the professional flight managers from Asymmetric Unmanned assure accuracy, security, and safety of crews, data, and operations.

Our experience has proven that utilities can also benefit significantly by utilizing a comprehensive, easy to use system that provides inspection-assessment-reporting in real-time, and can likely fit with existing workflows. 

Currently, most inspection workflows include a tedious process of uploading data to a third-party shared-drive such as Dropbox, which is essentially an unstructured repository to store raw images and files. Users then need to convert this raw data into structured data that can be sorted, filtered, organized, and only then placed into a geospatial system. Once that is done, the data and observations need to be accessed, rated, and reported. In some cases, these reports are then emailed to participants.

This time-consuming manual effort is inefficient and costly. Any responsive actions rely on the completion of this manual process before planning for and managing the damage.

Working with Beyond the Drone, most of these manual inspection processes have been automated within the patented UTELinspect software platform, including association of inspection data and images with each structure. An authorized user can immediately review and assess the data. Condition assessments are based on existing company nomenclature. The structure-centric data can be integrated via web services with existing ticketing and supply chain systems for even more efficiencies.

Smart Reports are easily configurable by selecting and filtering one or more data elements. Additionally, user-defined Smart Reports can interact with any Geospatial application and provide users with the ability to monitor work in real-time. This secure virtual system allows authorized users to view and share information nearly instantly.

Safety is paramount. Crews use built-in interactive tools to create risk assessments and risk mitigation strategies associated with each mission. In addition, crews have access to all government regulations and company safety plans for reference. Their planning record is retained for later compliance requirements.

Process flow 2 above illustrates the system's ability to improve productivity by eliminating the bottlenecks illustrated in Process flow 1 associated with managing multiple flight teams, inspecting hundreds of structures, and handling thousands of images that need to be reviewed and assessed in near real-time.

UTELinspect process improvements greatly accelerate inspection-assessment-reporting in real time, and simultaneously deliver accuracy and flexibility. In this era of labor shortages, public health dangers, and increasingly damaging storms, utilities need every improvement that can be found. Seeing is believing. Reach out to Beyond the Drone to see for yourself how the UTELinspect software platform can mitigate your bottlenecks.

Drone Operations Collaborative (DOC)

Beyond the Drone, together with Asymmetric Unmanned and Futura GIS, comprise the Drone Operations Collaborative (DOC). The DOC provides utilities with an end to end, solution for planning, inspecting, assessing, and reporting on utility assets during routine and emergency inspections.

Email queries to doc@beyondthedrone.com.