Inspections made easy
Look at how drones have radically improved just one task performed by many industries: inspection.
Construction and real estate, energy companies, and many other industries used to send a worker climbing slowly to high, low, cramped, or dangerous places or capturing details from an airplane or helicopter. Now, it’s trivial to put a drone in the air and do the same inspection at a tiny fraction of the former cost. Drones can quickly and thoroughly (and because of the low cost, frequently) inspect power lines, utility poles, pipelines, bridges, cell towers, industrial boilers, chemical storage containers, construction sites, fermenter tanks, pressure vessels, heat exchangers, storage silos, wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric facilities, dams, agricultural fields, quarries, and all manner of confined spaces.
Their flexibility also makes them compatible with a wide range of applications. For example, drones like the Matrice 300 RTK have transformed the mapping of challenging terrain without exposing survey crews to hazardous conditions. Drone deployment for surveying can produce multiple mapping outputs, including 2D and 3D orthomosaic maps, LiDAR point clouds, 3D models, thermal maps, and multispectral maps, providing surveyors with everything they need fast and cheaply.
This story originally appeared on Computerworld
