How AI Powers Industrial Inspections by Drone: the Neurala and Optelos Collaboration

Artificial Intelligence (AI) definitely tops the list of important themes for the drone industry.  From data management to flight automation, AI has been part of the description.  But how exactly does AI power processes like industrial inspections?  An integration between a drone data management platform and an AI company serves as an example.   Drone inspections generate a lot of images, huge quantities of data.  While not all of those images are useful, all of them need review in order to identify a potential defect – like finding a needle in a haystack.  That’s where AI can help – significantly reducing the human effort required to find that one important image from thousands of others.

The following is a Neurala press release.

Neurala Partners with Optelos to Deliver AI-Powered Industrial Inspections
Leaders in AI and digital asset management collaborate to improve asset inspections for cost, time savings, and risk reduction

Boston, MA – February 27, 2020 – AI-powered visual inspection pioneer Neurala today announced a collaboration with Optelos, the developer of the industry’s first patented enterprise SaaS platform designed to fully operationalize digital asset inspection and management. Neurala’s AI will be integrated with Optelos’ platform to deliver AI-powered industrial inspections, increasing the productivity for asset inspectors while reducing the time from defect identification to remediation – saving time and money while reducing risk.

Optelos is the leading way major companies organize, inspect, analyze, and act on digital asset information, up to and including the creation and management of a digital inspection twin. By providing a unified SaaS platform, Optelos helps both the people performing the inspections and the people using the inspection data to transform their business by lowering costs.

Optelos’ platform is integrated with Neurala’s vision AI platform, Brain Builder, to improve the efficacy and efficiency of defect and object identification. The joint solution enables enterprise asset visual inspection data to be stored and managed in the Optelos platform while simultaneously being leveraged to produce custom vision artificial intelligence that can automatically sift through future inspection data as it is added. As a result, companies save time and money while accelerating time-to-action at scale.

Neurala and Optelos have already successfully delivered solutions that identify defects and potential issues in oil and gas pipelines; specifically, with solutions that highlight lightning strikes on wind turbines, identify antennae on cell towers to ensure towers are hosting the appropriate equipment and detect defects within electrical infrastructure. More efficient identification and remediation of defective assets allow customers to reduce risk across assets.

“Working with Neurala, we at Optelos have been able to unlock insights that allow our customers to more quickly identify defects in their industrial assets at scale,” said Kevin McKeand, CEO of Optelos. “Neurala’s technology enables our clients to efficiently scale their inspection processes while improving their ability to take corrective action as quickly as possible.”

“Neurala is thrilled to partner with Optelos to improve the efficiency of industrial asset inspections,” said Massimiliano Versace, co-founder and CEO of Neurala. “As visual data becomes increasingly important within the workflow for asset management, organizations are already beginning to grapple with how to find meaning from the massive amount of image and video data being collected. By leveraging Optelos’ platform for the organization, storage and management of this data and combining that with our AI, we can surface the information that’s needed.  We look forward to continuing to scale our partnership to establish a new standard for digital asset inspection data management.”