What’s There to Drone About in Construction?

from dailycommercialnews.com

It wasn’t long ago that drones — unmanned aerial vehicles — were used almost exclusively by the military. But as technology advanced and prices came down, they have begun to do civilian jobs — with chores within the energy industry being an important part of their work.

Most people have heard of Amazon’s idea for using drones to deliver packages to your door, and a pizza chain is said to be looking at drones for delivery. But there are other uses that many people consider more important.

Skycatch is a start-up based in San Francisco, and it has raised $3.2 million from Google and other investors, to build a drone that has stirred a lot of interest in the energy industry.

Construction giants Bechtel and DPR Construction have signed deals to test Skycatch technology. So have First Solar, a developer of photovoltaic power plants, and SolarCity, a solar panel installer.

Already, Skycatch drones and other, more established companies are monitoring power lines, inspecting oil and gas pipelines, checking wind turbines for defects, and pinpointing malfunctioning solar panels.

Michael Blades is an analyst for the research firm Frost & Sullivan. He studies the UAV industry, and he says that “drones can do just about anything the energy companies don’t want to send people to do.”

In Waterloo, Ont., Aeryon Labs made headlines for supplying drones to rebels in Libya, but the firm is more and more involved in selling small quadcopters (helicopters with four rotors), and a variety of sensors as a way of doing safe, economical inspection of smokestacks, power lines and wind turbines without having to send workers to scale towers or hiring helicopters for a steep hourly fee to operate.

So Aeryon drones have been sent to look for cracks in wind turbine blades hanging high above the ground. BP, a big player in the international petroleum industry, has sent Aeyron drones with thermal cameras to Alaska to scan oil pipelines for hot spots that may be a sign of structural weaknesses.

Another Canadian firm, DraganFly, of Saskatoon, also sells drones for inspection work.

These machines all have one thing in common: They’re small helicopters with four, six or eight rotors. Some stand just 25 centimetres tall and have a radius of about 70 cm. They can be folded up and carried in a case and can be deployed in a few minutes. They are battery operated and easy to fly.

Some are designed to operate autonomously. The Skycatch drones, for example, when their mission is finished, fly back to a ground station. As it approaches, it uses its own sensors and a radio signal to make the approach and landing.

Back on the ground, a robotic arm switches out the battery for a fresh one, and data on the old one is then sent to a cloud service.

A drone inspecting a solar farm can easily pick out broken or malfunctioning panels from a field of thousands.

At the moment, though, that inspection is done by employees making their way around the facility using hand-held devices. But the Agua Caliente solar farm — which First Solar maintains — covers 10 square miles of desert in the American southwest. Inspection by ground workers is time-consuming and expensive.

The Skycatch drones, however, will be able to do the inspection by flying low over the solar arrays at speeds of up to 50 miles an hour.

Utilities are also testing drones to aid in the recovery from damage caused by extreme weather. The little machines can scout for damaged transmission lines in remote areas that may be flooded or blocked by fallen trees. They can also take pictures of the damage and send them back to base for evaluation.

But inspections of energy facilities are not limited to airborne vehicles.

International Climbing Machines, of Ithaca, N.Y., makes climbing robots which make their inspection by creeping up the tower and along the turbine blades. They can also be used for blade repairs, tower cleaning, paint inspections and repairs, even sanding surfaces to prepare them for painting.

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