Engineering Product Lifecycle for Drone Inspection Software
The global drone surveillance technology market is projected to grow to USD 18.18 billion by 2025.
At a Glance
As per the study from PwC, the adoption of drones in surveillance, across different industries has helped organizations with an annual cost savings of 50%.
This case study talks about Azilen‘s engagement with one of its clients for collaborative product development of drone inspection software for automated aerial inspection.
Let’s discover some details about this platform built with a purpose – airport runway surveillance powered by AI drone inspection.
Key Highlights
Adaptable to real-world situations
Quickly address risks
Drone visualization and simulation
Real time Tracking and analytics
Streamline Reporting
Scalable technology for airworthiness
Challenges
- High-fidelity data capture & processing
- Real-time surveillance of airport runways
- Analyze situational & climatic impact of On-field missions
- Detailed technical evaluation of 3 drone SDKs
- Hardware programming & integrations with limited documentation
About Client
The client is the US based product company offering a Drone based automated aerial inspection platform for airports.
AVIATION
Industry
SAFETY
Domain
USA
Location
How we helped?
Azilen engaged with the client for blue-printing the concept from idea to implementation, thus envisioned an automated drone inspection software.
A robust platform was engineered with a comprehensive technical due-diligence on drone systems, SDKs, high-performance architectures and effective control mechanisms.
140+
Inspections Daily
28%
Cost Reduction
52%
Reduced Accidents
The Solution
Automated drone inspection software can be used across multiple use cases for aerial inspection in different industries. However, in this case, study we are detailing a specific use case of airport AI drone inspections.
The platform consists of 4 main components which are used by different stakeholders involved in the aerial inspection process:
1. Drone Device: Hardware device executing the aerial inspection.
2. Surveyor app: Surveyor uses this Android tab for drone flight & monitoring
3. Remote Control Panel: Operations staff uses this application for drone configuration & control
4. Simulator Toolkit: This is used by the development team for testing simulated drone operations
Below is the overview of automated drone inspection software:
1. Drone device with enhanced capture & processing: Quadcopter IF 750 drone devices were used along with a mounted additional hardware kit of Jetson Nano with the camera.
- Edge device detects the obstacles and allows the drones to process and analyze video footage in real-time.
- An edge device serves as a communication channel between the back-end system and the drone to enhance the features of drones for Camera image processing.
- It receives commands and data from the back-end system and transmits them to the drone and vice versa.
2. Surveyor application: The Surveyor application operates in an Android tab and the user can create and inspect missions by selecting the available drones for the inspection process.
- Create a mission and select available drones for the inspection process.
- Monitor the entire mission with Start, Pause, Resume, Abort, and End commands & view the replay of the inspected mission.
- Users can view real-time video streaming with a first-person view using openVidu for a mission.
“Drone technology is the future of aviation inspections.” – Peter Ingram, CEO of Hawaiian Airlines.
Drone surveillance technology has faced various constraints in terms of inspections, it is essential that the inspection process becomes highly optimized and automated in terms of operations.
The combination of technologies, adaption to growing modern trends and skilled team yields the best outcome. An indispensable eco-system for any provider shall be equipped with a platform that:
- Has quickly identified potential safety issues that increased reliability.
- Enhanced the inspection process in aviation.
- Provides real time tracking and analytics
3. Simulator Toolkit: Gazebo is a software tool that provides a real-time visual representation of the drone’s flight and interactions with the surroundings in the Surveyor application.
- Simulator Toolkit is essential for drone visualization and simulation to save time and money spent on physical testing and rapid iteration.
- Users can test different flight paths in a safe and controlled environment.
- It allows for testing and refining drone technology before deployment in the field.
4. Remote Control Panel: Remote Control Panel is referred to as a console application that is used to create tenants and inspections to generate flight paths with parameters.
- Tenant is the addition of an area that the user wants to inspect and it is created from the Remote-Control Panel.
- Inspection is an area that the user wants to inspect and it is created from the Remote-Control Panel.
- Users can create a flight path for inspection with parameters such as longitude & latitude through different locations that are referred to as features and shapes in the portal.
