3. 4,000,000 Worldwide
With a drone can inspect 3X more in a day
One of the most dangerous jobs
Cell Tower Inspections
4. Millions of miles of transmission & distribution utility lines
Tree related outages are significant threats to the delivery of electricity
One of the largest maintenance expenses
Powerline Surveys
5. Enterprises require Solutions that…
Are reliable and repeatable
Are compliant and insurable
Require minimal training
Integrate with existing software & workflows
Scale in use cases, geography & time
Create actionable insights
6. Planning
• Job criteria
• Aircraft
• Sensors
• Location
• Operators
Approvals
• Manager
• Safety
• Insurance
• Aviation
authority
Collection
• Field crews
• Service
providers
Analysis
• Point clouds
• 3D models
• Structural
• Change
detection
Integration
• EAM
• ERP
• GIS
• CAD
Distribution
• Reports
• Maps
Project Workflow
It is generally accepted that the single largest cause of electric power outages occurs when trees, or portions of trees, grow or fall into overhead power lines. For utilities, vegetation management expenses are one of the largest expense items associated with maintaining overhead transmission and distribution electrical systems. For example, one of the largest US utilities (PG&E) spends ~$168 million a year managing vegetation.
Reliable & Repeatable - Should involve significant automation
Compliant & Insurable – For enterprises to deploy this for high value applications, they require compliance and insurance\
Minimal Training – In most cases, the aerial data collected by drones is not a complete replacement for people being on the scene and is instead just one additional tool in workers kits, so it needs be deployable by existing workers
Integrate – Right now, many of the solutions in the field are piecemeal with a lot of friction when it comes time to move data from one system to another. Enterprises want key data collected by drones integrated into their existing workflows, asset management, resource planning, and GIS software
Scale in use cases, geography, and time
Create actionable insights
Enterprise asset management (EAM) software provides a way for companies to manage physical assets, enabling managers to control and pro-actively optimize operations for quality and efficiency. One of the top software packages used in infrastructure industries (e..g, utilities) is IBM Maximo software. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are used to manage an organization’s financials. Top software providers include SAP, Oracle, NetSuite and Microsoft. Geographic information system (GIS) software is designed to store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of spatial or geographical data. Top solution providers include ESRI, MapInfo and ERDAS.
Points to hit:
Diversity of applications
The need to tailor drones to the application
Points to hit:
Diversity of applications
The need to tailor drones to the application
We’re focusing on building the portion that is common to all commercial drone solutions:
Hardware, with associated device drivers which make it compatible with the underlying vehicles and 3rd party sensors
Software, with API’s enabling 3rd parties to develop additional software capabilities
And a cloud back-end, with cloud services that enable data collected from the drone to be shared, analyzed, and disseminated.
The part we’re doing in the middle is the hard part.
Companies that make the differentiated pieces need to compete on the point of differentiation, often in very competitive markets. They want to do whatever they can to make their hardware or software easy to use, but they’re not going to do the middle part.