Best practice for power lines tower inspection
Dear Community,
My daily job is to inspect power line towers. We look for :
- the area under the lines (mainly vegetation)
- the overall shape of the towers
- the insulator chains. This is between the wire and the tower steel structure. We are looking for signs of faults. So we need at least 4 photos from different directions.
We use drones flying by hand, but I want to create automated flight routes. The mission would look like this: flying between the towers (video), taking 4 photos of each insulator, and going to the next tower. Evaluate the photos later.
The first idea is creating the mission on-the-fly. Fortunately, the towers are mostly the same so it would be practical to create the flight around one tower once and later just copy-paste to every flight mission and add the route by hand between the towers. I'm not sure how is that possible. Is DL 3D flight planner able to do this? If yes, what is the method to do this?
Our goal is to inspect 4-5 towers in one mission.
The second idea is that we have the 3D dwg file of the towers and the kml file for the whole line. Unfortunately, I have no idea about the steps, but long-term this seems better.
Thank you
Szabolcs
Comments
4 comments
Hi Szabolcs Eitzenberger. No one has replied so I’ll try to help. First you can’t capture video and take a photo at same time. So it would need to be one or the other. As far as setting up a plan once and then copying it then yes. So you could set up one mission on a location and then once it has been completed it can be accessed in the Web app and saved as a plan then copied. Then you could move them to the desired location to run it again. Hope that helps.
okay, thank you
Interesting. I recently worked for the local power utility and had to inspect hundreds of feeder line poles. I had exactly the same need. I think an On-The-Fly inspection component that could be incorporated like adding a Waypoint would do the trick. Apparently Drone Harmony has such a feature now. Might be worth looking into. Also I would suggest submitting a feature request here. There definitely is a market for this component. https://www.facebook.com/547604320/videos/448278881610421/
Here is the Feature request I submitted: https://support.dronelink.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/34791244830099-Using-Inspection-Components-in-On-The-Fly-Missions-Like-5-Photo-Pole-Inspections
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