Aeriosense is a state-of-the-art system of Unmanned Aircrafts (UAC) for aerial inspections that reduces the implementation cost by excluding live operators from the real-time coordination process.
Why is Automated Management More Beneficial Than Manual?
Let us first understand what the manual control of the drone means. In particular, this is a process conducted by a live operator. They must have the professional skills to fly such devices efficiently. To provide the communication with the drone, the remote control device is used. Thus, the pilot visually observes the aircraft, monitors its route with the GPS or executes the direct control using the video camera built into the device. The drawbacks of such way of management are obvious: visibility conditions and the range of the radio link established between the drone and the console are limited. This means that with such remote control its flight area would not exceed a mile or so. In addition, when the operator uses a video camera to track a route, control can become difficult due to the weather conditions. And, we should also note, that the pilot should also be well-oriented on the terrain.
If we talk about automated drones, in practice such crafts can execute the following tasks in the unmanned mode:
- route navigation;
- changing the flight altitude;
- changing the flight direction;
- arriving at the specified point;
- returning to the base station.
In this case, the drone is usually guided by data which is obtained from GPS receivers, altimeters, magnetic field detectors, other navigational systems, and sensors (barometers, weather stations, etc.). With this information, UAC determines the current coordinates and optimizes its route independently.
Thus, the automatic control provides the possibility of a fully autonomous UAC flight based on using a predefined trajectory, while upholding a predefined speed and predefined orientation angles. In addition, such solution, implemented with the help of an autopilot, guarantees a safe flight, regardless of whether the device has a connection to the base station or weather conditions. Also, this type of control is currently in the most demand because it has the least requirements for personnel training.
Summary
And last but not least – let us answer the question asked in the title of the article: “How much money can automated aerial inspection save for a company?” According to the statistics, an average hourly rate of a professional operator is about $25, which equals to $48,000 per year according to the standard working schedule. In turn, implementing an automatic UAC control system like the Aeriosense solution allows to pay once and conduct regular aerial inspections for years with minimal maintenance costs. Thus, you get a completely autonomous system that requires the minimum intervention from humans.
