Power Line Inspection with Drones Overview

Effective way to inspect and manage Power Lines with improved speed, efficiency, safety and systems for data management.

  • Drones enable collecting the needed data for identifying and mitigating risks in power distribution in advance
  • Greatly reduce man hours and costs by automating inspections, saving 30 – 50% of the cost and time when using drones to conduct power line inspection.
  • Assess the condition and orientation of all components of cell towers with no need for workers to ascend to height
  • Inspections are drone from a safe distance while increasing efficiency due to data accuracy and reliability with real-time images, video feed, and zoom/thermal/4k capabilities can be transmitted to a ground control station.
  • Thermal and LIDAR can be used to aid in inspecting and monitoring the corridor for power lines and towers
  • Higher-resolution visual inspections than ground-based inspections
  • Towers remain functional during inspection

Types of Power Line Inspections

Corridor Mapping

Corona Detection

Substation Static Line Inspection

Intermittent Power

Thermal Imaging and LiDAR for Power Line Inspections

ABJ Drones has effective thermal imaging and LiDAR techniques, and proprietary airframes to capture engineering-grade levels of accuracy for use in detailed point clouds and analytics for generations. Including, geo tagging to localize specific area of inspection (AOI) and a proprietary back end processing solution to enable companies with instant sourcing and identification. This allows us to effectively inspect transmission/power lines.

Inspecting Power Lines with LIDAR

  • Ideal for corridor mapping as linear assets can be intimately traced
  • Drone can follow corridor routes ensuring efficiency in speed of data capture
  • Low height and slow flying speed delivers engineering-grade levels of accuracy for use in the detailed design

ABJ RFID Asset Management

  • Decrease data collection time  
  • Reduce or eliminate human data entry errors Improve asset inventory quality
  • Diminish cycle time
  • Reduce repeated site visits
  • Improve accuracy of assets
  • Customizable API with 98 % suitability with established CRM or depository  

This includes assets in warehouses, picked up by contractors, in technicians’ trucks, deployed at sites, decommissioned, identify assets for resale and reduce capital assets

Implementation of Inspection

  1. A brief accountability of the assets.  
  2. Methodology is created that focuses on safety and productivity.
  3. During a study of existing transmission lines ABJ Drones and Coutts will provide condition of assets which will be used to create inspection plans.  
  4. Each system is broken down and SOP’s are developed specific to each system.
  5. Emergency procedures are put in place and pilots are trained with these SOPs in mind.  
  6. Any infrastructure reporting that currently existed is modified and fitted to allow UAS data to flow into it.  
  7. Data processing plans are integrated into the inspection workflow and data management is set up with the companies backend data management system or Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system.
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Power Line Inspection Examples

Drone Corridor Mapping with LiDAR