How AI Is Pushing Industrial Drone Use Into a New Era

AI tools set to trigger rapid industry adoption of drones

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

Although over the past couple of decades some heavy industries have been quick to adopt the use of drones and robotics to perform tasks that are difficult to dangerous for humans to perform, the introduction of the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools is expected to catapult industrial drone and robotics use to the next level.

That was the message of the Energy Drone/Robotics & Industrial AI Forum held in Houston on November 12.  With their ability to use and learn from existing data sets and to automate data collection systems, AI applications can streamline drone inspection routines, spot potential problems requiring maintenance and enhance worker safety.

Some drone-related companies have been employing AI tools in their operations for years and are now incorporating them into the products that they offer to their customers.

“We’ve been doing this for many years and I think what is new for us would be the AI agents that we’ve been introducing,” Jeff Cohen, an enterprise account executive at DroneDeploy, said in his conference presentation.

Earlier this year, DroneDeploy introduced Safety AI, which has already been deployed at some oil and gas-related sites. “Safety AI just takes that image of a work site, whether it’s a construction site, or whether it’s an oil and gas site and it’ll catch safety risks automatically,” Cohen said.

Progress AI, another AI tool that the company introduced last July, is just what it sounds like, he said. “If you’re building something, again, whether it’s general construction, whether you’re building something in oil and gas, we can help you track the progress of that project.”

Drone Deploy is currently developing a third AI-related product, Inspection AI. “We started beta testing and we actually formally announced it two weeks ago at our customer conference in Southern California,” he said.

“There are more and more platforms that are being integrated with AI. So, for the end-user, the customer that’s out in the field, it’s making their job much easier,” Michael Clanahan, a UAV operator and sales and services support specialist with Frontier Precision, said on the sidelines of the conference.

He said AI’s ability to use data to identify objects makes it the ideal tool to use for drone inspections of industrial facilities. “It’s using their software in order to do inspections,” he said. Such inspections can often take the place of sending a human in to a potentially dangerous situation to do a job.

“So that in the end they’re saving money, they’re saving time, and they’re also saving manpower,” he said.

Some industries slow to adopt AI tools

However, as a result of a number of factors, some industry segments, such as the upstream segment of the oil and gas business, have been slower than others to embrace the use of AI-assisted drones and robotics in their operations, speakers said.

“The petrochemical sector and even oil and gas are kind of behind on implementing a lot of that technology,” Marty Robinson, chief technology officer and cofounder of Mars Applied Technology, said on the sidelines of the conference. “Mostly it’s a lot of barriers to cross in order for AI or even a simple machine-vision or any kind of algorithm like that to really work.”

He said AI tools require large data sets to draw upon in order to work properly, and although oil and gas companies have large sets of data — which they’d collected electronically over a period of years — that data is often stored, or siloed, in many different places.

While AI solutions providers can deal with the data silo problem, oftentimes large corporations are reluctant to turn their vast stores of data over to a third-party contractor.

“There’s a lot of resistance on picking a lot of these small startup software solutions companies,” Robinson said. “They’d rather not develop in that space unless they’re doing some stuff internally. We’re one step behind implementing AI because we need to clean up all the data and organize all the data first.”

Another impediment that seems to be slowing the oil and gas industry’s adoption of AI-assisted drone inspections and testing is the lack of trust on the part of the oil companies.

“Previously a lot of this technology was very complicated to operate,” Robinson said. The drone inspection providers tended to enlist technicians that were experienced with the drone operations and AI technology, but not necessarily with the highly specialized area of equipment inspection.

“And so, I think the next key is you need to get the operators of these robotic platforms to get the certifications so that they become inspectors,” he said.

“I think building their skillset is what’s going to be important,” he said. “That trust would get developed, automatically.”

The upstream oil and gas industry’s reluctance to embrace AI-assisted robotics tools is somewhat ironic in that the industry segment, especially in the offshore arena, was among the pioneers for developing much of today’s robotics industry.

“Where we saw robotics first is where they had no choice,” Robinson said. “In deep water, in nuclear reactors, that’s where all most of our robotic platforms started because they didn’t have an option. They had to use robotics there.”

He said he expects that the deepwater exploration-and-production segment of the oil industry would once again become a leader in the adoption of new technology, such as AI-enhanced drones and robotics. “A lot of stuff’s going to get accelerated for offshore because that’s where the bigger [return on investment] is,” he said. “Then it can trickle down to the onshore.”

Read more:

• Navigating the Future of the Drone Industry: Autonomy, AI, and Workforce Transformation
• Dronescape: What Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Means for the Commercial and Dual-Use Drone Industry
• Arcsky Introduces the X55 V2: New American-Made Aircraft with Enhancements for Industrial Drone Applications

Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.