Automated Flight Planning — the First Step to Revolutionizing Your Inspection Program
Drone technology has revolutionized the physical infrastructure inspection industry, allowing for faster and safer inspections of hard-to-reach locations. However, to ensure the success of your inspection program, it’s critical to have a well-planned flight plan. In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of automated flight planning and the key components of a successful flight plan.
Why Automated Flight Planning is Important
Automated flight planning is an essential step in revolutionizing your inspection program. By automating the flight planning process, you can reduce in-field time and costs, identify potential obstacles that could impact safety, and ensure that customer expectations are fully met.
- Reducing In-Field Time and Costs: By having a well-planned flight plan, you can minimize in-field time, reducing the cost of labor and equipment required to complete inspections. Automated flight planning software can calculate the optimal flight path, taking into account the location of the inspection site and any obstacles that may be present.
- Identifying Obstacles for Improved Safety: Automated flight planning software can also identify potential obstacles, such as wetlands or restricted areas, that could impact the safety of the team while in the field. By identifying these obstacles ahead of time, you can ensure that the drone follows a safe flight path, reducing the risk of accidents.
- Ensuring Customer Expectations are Met: Automated flight planning also helps ensure that customer expectations are met. By using software to plan the flight, you can calculate the estimated time required for the inspection, the number of batteries needed, and the equipment required. This allows you to provide accurate cost estimates to the customer, ensuring that expectations are met. The Flight Plan is reviewed with the customer, prior to execution to ensure all expectations and information available is aligned.
What We Automatically Plan For
When creating a flight plan, there are several key components that need to be taken into consideration. These include:
- Batteries Required: The number of batteries required will depend on the size and weight of the drone, as well as the length of the inspection. It’s important to ensure that there are enough batteries to complete the inspection without interruptions.
- Flight Time: Flight time should also be taken into account, as it will impact the length of the inspection.
- Travel Time: The time required to travel to and from the inspection site should also be considered when creating a flight plan. This will impact the total time required for the inspection, as well as the cost.
- Takeoff Points: The location of the takeoff point is important, as it will impact the flight path of the drone. The takeoff point should be chosen to ensure that the drone can complete the inspection safely and efficiently. Minimizing the amount takeoff points greatly reduces in-field time, therefore the cost of the inspection.
- Field Operations Cost Estimation: The cost of the inspection is calculated, taking into account the cost of labour, equipment, room and board, data annotation (optional), and any other associated costs.
- Software Compute Cost Estimations: Any software-related cost (i.e., data hosting on the Platform) is also calculated into account when creating the overall flight plan.
Detect’s proprietary Flight Planning Engine generates the above outputs automatically once an inspection is requested from our Platform.
Our Flight Planning Process
At Detect, we’ve developed our own proprietary Flight Planning Engine to automate the majority of our flight planning process. This ensures the success of our inspection program while doing so safely and cost-effectively. Our process is as follows:
- The Customer Requests an Inspection: A customer can request an inspection on our Platform.
- Customer-Provided Data: At a minimum, customers will be required to provide asset GPS coordinates (i.e. KML file) and asset IDs ( required to associate images automatically to the specific asset). Additional information such as access notes or known obstacles can also be provided in either text format or as a KML file. This additional information can greatly improve flight operations planning to ensure smooth operations can occur.
- Internally Available Data: We gather data from our previous inspections, including access trails and notes, to inform our flight plan. This allows us to optimize our flight path and reduce in-field time.
- Externally Available Data: We also gather data from external sources, such as flight-restricted areas and terrain topography, to ensure that the flight plan is safe and efficient. This information informs our Flight Planning Engine where to locate the optimal drone take-off points, while always maintaining a Visual Line of Sight (VLOS).
Post-Flight Process
After the inspection is complete, we update our flight plan based on the actuals of the flight operations, including the takeoff points used and any newly identified obstacles found during the operations. This allows us to continuously improve our flight plan for future inspections, creating a positive feedback loop that ensures the ever-improving success of our inspection program.
Conclusion
Automated flight planning is an essential step in revolutionizing your inspection program. By automating the flight planning process, you can reduce in-field time and costs, identify potential obstacles that could impact safety, and ensure that customer expectations are met. When creating a flight plan, it’s important to take into consideration the number of batteries required, flight time, travel time, takeoff points, cost estimation, and software compute costs. At Detect, we use our proprietary Flight Planning Engine along with customer-provided, internal, and external available data. After each inspection, we update our flight plan based on the actuals, creating a positive feedback loop that continuously improves the success of our inspection program. By implementing automated flight planning in your own inspection program, you can increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve safety, ultimately ensuring the success of your inspections.
