Category: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

What’s usually attached to a drone? A video camera, of course. It is quite popular to mount it on the drone and lift as far above the ground as the connection reaches and catch a panoramic breathtakingly beautiful view on that camera. This is, however, a mere 9% of what you can do with this machine. Besides, there are a lot more interesting toys to mount on drones, and, in today’s post, I’ll tell you all about drone sensors.

Article by Pavel Tatarintsev, NNTC R&D Head
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Sensors. There are a great many sensors one can attach to drones. You can give them a keen magic power to see things and solve business problems faster, and I’m excited to share the most impressive cases with you: oil spill detection and ground penetrating radar (GPR).

Drone sensors and oil spill detection

This drone sensor is a specific type of a thermal imager (looks like a tiny cube with an opaque black mirror lens) that can measure polarized light. Taking light as a form of an electromagnetic wave, we can distinguish electric and magnetic fields there. Before polarization, we have unpolarized light emitted, for example, by the sun or a lamp. Polarization means removing any electromagnetic waves from the beam, except for those being in a certain plane of polarization. Light reflected from oil and water has different polarization angles. Gotcha! Now you see it.

An on-board computer connects the drone and the sensor and processes data in real time. The camera receives two video streams: thermal radiation and the polarized (reflected) light in each pixel of the image. Both streams combined to allow for detecting hydrocarbons on the water surface (gas, diesel, oil, and kerosene).

Here is my recommendation regarding the best drone for such an industrial inspection. The choice, however, depends on the environment. For example, a kilometer-long and 0.5 kilometer-wide coastline inspection is a job for DJI M-200 and M-300 drones. If you need to monitor an area of at least 10 by 40 kilometers, then consider flying machines that look more like planes, as they can stay in the air longer (3-6 hours) and travel farther.

If a refinery is tasked with tracking oil spills in its waters, this sensor will be an essential asset, being able to detect the tiniest spills right away and avert a disaster. In addition, this sensor is more user-friendly than bulky marine radars and its polarization camera sees oil spills in calm waters, unlike the radar. Finally, you can schedule drone flights around the area to get updates on the state of the water around the production area.

Drones and GPR

Loosely speaking, GPR is a radar that can see underground. This drone sensor has a couple of commercial applications.

One of the most common and practical use cases is to locate pipes and other utility lines in urban areas. City development usually takes time and not always sticks to an initial plan, like in case of underground utility systems. Reasons differ. The original drawings could be lost and then recreated from memory or georeferencing wasn’t around until quite recently, while works were carried out some 30-40 years ago. Anyway, it’s a common thing when a drawing says that a water pipe is under the sidewalk, but, in fact, the pipe runs three meters away from there under the road.

Such discrepancies greatly complicate the planning of utility systems repair or installation. Just fancy that you need to lay new fiber-optic cables in an old city. You take the drawings, study them, and decide to lay a new pipe under the roadway. There you are: the traffic is blocked, roads are closed, concrete is broken up, and workers are digging. Two months and thousands of cubic meters later, they hit the pipe. To say it is a surprise might be an understatement.

GPR drone sensors can save you from such an oopsie. It detects the reflected signals from subsurface structures, but the material must have enough density to reflect these waves. I’ll give you an example. We are trying to survey a sandy area. There is a pipe two meters beneath the surface. The sand is quite transparent for radio waves. Having reached the pipe, the radio wave is reflected back to you, so the GPR can receive it and show you the location of the metal material under the sand. However, you won’t see anything under the pipe, because the radio wave has already been reflected back. Clay, metal, reinforced concrete and water (especially soil and salt water) reflect waves well. This radar is especially useful when you look for a perfect site to build a skyscraper.

There are high and low-frequency GPRs. The higher frequency, the more detailed image, but the less the vision depth is. In other words, at a higher frequency, you will see smaller objects more accurately. For example, a 100 MHz GPR will show you a metal pipe being one meter in diameter and laid three meters underground. But it will be blind to a pipe with a diameter of ten centimeters – such a small object requires a radar of higher frequency. However, depending on the ground, low-frequency GPRs can locate objects at the depth of 30, 40, and even 100 meters. SPH Engineering, for example, discovered a whole plane in a glacier in Greenland buried 130 meters under ice, which is made of distilled water and thus remains transparent for radio waves.

Drone sensors – a tool for every job

You can select a perfect sensor for the job when you set the objectives. Say, you need to find a metal object under the layer of the salt sand that doesn’t allow waves through. Use a magnetometer. If so required, you can put an ultrasonic sensor to use. But that’s another story to tell sometime later.

To conclude, technologies have a wide range of applications to solve any task of any complexity. Think out of the box and you’ll find the way.

Read more

• Your personal AI for efficient and fast industrial inspection: ATLAS, drone, and desert bush counting
• Now I see you! How polarization helps detect oil spills
• “The drone illusion” from the engineering perspective

Drones perform multiple functions and can be used virtually in any industry. Goldman Sachs forecasts a $100 billion market opportunity for drones as powered by growing demand from the commercial and civil government sectors: $45 billion (infrastructure), $32 billion (agriculture), $13 billion (transport), and $10 billion (security). Drone use by builders is rather promising as drones can be introduced at any construction and development stage.

What can drones do at a construction site? Drones can optimize the construction process in various unexpected ways. Let’s talk about the following three functions:

1. Construction progress control
2. Assessment of emergencies
3. Building Information Modeling

Construction progress control helps to acquire information on construction site changes over specific period and compare current status with planned construction documentation. Drone flies around the construction site in an automated mode, while also taking photos and making orthophoto-, 3D- and landscape maps. The accumulated data goes to a private web portal accessible to responsible persons and construction stakeholders only, thus contributing to fast and streamlined communication between construction participants, as well as easier control over staff performance.

Drones also provide ad-hoc monitoring of the location of construction machinery, construction materials and temporary facilities. Small-sized drones can approach hard-to-reach engineering components.

Assessment of emergencies. In case of emergency, a drone flies on site to take photos and shoot videos, with all information being sent online to a situation center for prompt issue resolution. In addition, drones can perform live broadcasting.

Building Information Modeling. Drone photogrammetry makes it possible to not only match a certain construction stage with the plan but also then deliver an eye-catching site presentation in 3D. Once construction is over, a drone flies around the completed site and collects data to be then transformed into a precise 3D model of the facility. Such a model can be easily presented on a holographic table, a new presentation tool for real estate segment. 

Drones are compatible with various advanced technologies (e.g. video analytics, BIM, drone show software and security solutions) and thus can be used almost in any sector.

Any industrial inspection solves three main tasks: data collection (photos of objects), analysis (identifying defects and abnormalities), and reporting. Today, Pavel Tatarintsev will talk about ATLAS – image analysis and automatic reporting system that covers the most labor-intensive industrial inspection tasks.

Article by Pavel Tatarintsev, NNTC R&D Head
LinkedIn | Mail

Naturally, ATLAS is not the first solution on the market that analyzes photos and automates reporting, but its unique easily trainable AI module makes it a truly handy and unparalleled tool.

How I taught ATLAS to find bushes in the desert

I will describe the module operation using my own user experience as an example. One weekend, I decided to go to the desert and, just for fun, teach my ATLAS to recognize bushes. It was an easy, interesting, and clear process. I used a standard laptop with installed UgCS and ATLAS software, as well as a 400g DJI Mavic Air drone with a built-in wide-angle camera. This is a small, quite popular and affordable drone.

First, an engineer needs to draw a route for a drone in UgCS (below is the screenshot of my drone’s route). I set the frequency of taking photos and the following parameters. It took my drone 15 minutes to fly around three hectares.

As a result, I got approximately 100 photos for analysis.

I uploaded the photos to ATLAS, which, in 5 minutes, created an area map with the relief. As I wanted ATLAS to learn how to find bushes, I then used a marker to outline the bushes on some 20-30 photos and launched a search by photos.

In 20 minutes (including AI training and photo search), I got my result. The program managed to count not only the number of bushes, but also (if needed) the total area covered by them. Indeed, you can set any parameters and reporting targets for this flexible and intelligent solution.

It is efficient, isn’t it? I believe very much so. Now imagine that the solution can find not only bushes, but also cracks on roads, rust on metal structures (for example, rusty spots on ships), oil spills, and any other things or flaws that the built-in AI can learn.

Is it easy to teach ATLAS AI for drone industrial inspection? Depends on what you want it to learn. When it comes to rusty spots on the pipe surface, all it takes is just a few photos with outlined spot examples. But if you need AI to find a green car in the green leaves, it’s more challenging and the system will need more examples for training.

ATLAS and industrial inspection tasks

Let me tell you the story of one of our customers (without mentioning its name). Our customer bought a ‘fixed-wing’ drone (a plane-like model that can fly continuously over long distances, collecting necessary data) and had a camera installed on it to shoot the sea surface. The drone flew and brought back 12,000 photos to be analyzed for oil spills. Just imagine how long it would take to manually analyze and document all these photos. Plus, oil film is often very difficult for the human eye to see on the waves. Nevertheless, the customer successfully addressed the challenge opting for ATLAS that was taught by an engineer to promptly find oil spills on photos.

This solution is also used to fly around and inspect the condition of oil pipes and production facilities, survey vegetation, as well as scan object surfaces, soil, and asphalt. The solution can be easily applied virtually in any sector and for any task. You can even set it the task to not only looking for defects but also rank them by hazard.

This is how artificial intelligence facilitates inspections and ensures control over the safety of both facilities and the environment. All you need to do is ‘explain’ ATLAS what task you want it to solve.

If you have any questions about drone industrial inspection, please go to the solution page on our website, subscribe to my blog, or message me on LinkedIn.

Read more

• Technology boost for oil & gas
• Now I see you! How polarization helps detect oil spills
• “The drone illusion” from the engineering perspective

Drones are modestly sized unmanned aerial vehicles making headline news and buzzing around. They are featured in spy action movies and video games playing the role of enemy technology or helping a protagonist to outplay enemies. Either way, this stunning fictional representation lures our minds into a trap of “the drone illusion”. To pierce this veil, let’s take a look from the engineering perspective.

Engineering considers aerodynamic efficiency of a drone design and numerous factors, including the laws of nature equally applying to everyone and everything.

We need a vehicle perfectly performing functional tasks, which, in our case, takes off at once, hovers steadily, and transports cargo over long distances. We need…a helicopter. During the last 50-60 years, the appearance of all helicopters remains virtually the same, in general, there are two main aerodynamic designs. Why so? Helicopter is the proven golden standard in fuel efficiency, agility, and effective load-carrying capability. Coaxial rotor helicopters, for instance, are the most fuel-efficient. (Coaxial rotors are a pair of helicopter rotors mounted one above the other, with the same axis, but rotating in opposite directions). Such a sophisticated machine design requires not one, not a dozen, but a huge task force that includes specialists highly qualified for the job.

As for drones, they are compact, lightweight, and easy to assemble – you don’t need an engineer’s degree to make such a flying device for yourself. And let’s make it clear: all drones are aerial vehicles, but not every drone is created by professional engineers specializing in aerodynamics. The industry has a few companies engaged seriously with drone designing. Though there are many young talents bubbling with enthusiasm to write an excellent code and solve challenges and, of course, impatient to field-test it. Sometimes, a team intentionally sacrifices aerodynamic efficiency in favor of easier and faster development. However, even if they installed a software masterpiece on such a drone, its power would still be limited by design. Plenty of original ideas remain untranslated into reality without a professional engineer in a team.

Drones come in a great number of shapes and sizes, but the majority has two weaknesses:

• Low energy efficiency, as compared to helicopters, which limits both the flight time and load carrying capability
• Poor flexibility and balance, as compared to the bigger brother

When it comes to business tasks, people start talking about drones and fall into the trap of their own illusions about drones. It goes like this: “We want you to develop for us a drone that can…blah-blah-blah”. Is it really a good way to solve a business problem?

Let me tell you one story about agricultural business. Thirty or so years ago, small helicopters were actively used to spray the fields. Since then, their market share has been slashed, while drones’ share has increased. Back to the business task: transportation of chemicals to spray the fields. To be more or less effective, a drone has to be capable of spraying 15-20 liters per flight. Before drones, the market supplied radio-controlled helicopters carrying 15-30 liters of chemicals, thus significantly dropping the cost of treating one hectare, as compared to conventional methods. Today, an agricultural drone – a bulky and barely transportable vehicle worth of $25,000 to 30,000 USD – can carry some 15-16 liters of liquid. Just compare: a modern helicopter with the same load carrying capacity costs $10,000 USD, but it flies faster and more flexibly, and its battery works longer. Moreover, it is easy to transport – you can fold the rotors and put its body in a car trunk. This is the trap of “the drone illusion”: helicopter costs less and works better, but drones grow in demand.

“The drone illusion” hurts the industry. In fact, the existing drone design simply can’t get better, as technology evolves evenly for all aerial vehicles. Should the drone battery improve, the helicopter’s will improve too. Thus, the developers with more experienced in-house engineers will have a competitive edge.

How to avoid “the drone illusion” trap? Actually, it’s easy. Drones can effectively solve certain tasks. Take logics to a new level: don’t try to adapt drones. Start searching for the right flying vehicle and consult with an engineer. This will help you save money, avoid hassle, and expand the technological capacity. Discover the richness of technology of the 21st century.

by Pavel Tatarintsev, NNTC R&D Head

Sorry, fireworks, it’s been a pleasure looking at you, but you are out. We are looking for something else to take our breath away. Dancing drones is a new trendy thing, giving people a thrill of fresh experience – same sparkling lights, but smart. But how does it work? Let’s take a peep behind the scenes and watch show creators at work.

If there is a swarm of 300 or 1,000 drones, imperfections in their position against one another and the ground are scarcely noticeable – this vigorous whirling formation of pieces of light, each separated by a few meters from the rest, is too big, and any error or desync is almost invisible. Even if a couple of drones just fall down, it’s no bother. Though it’s not the case for hotels and parks preferring drone show of 20 to 90 flying dancers. There is no margin for error and drones are expected to move in perfect harmony. So, how to prepare a drone show? You can’t just make these vehicles pirouette in the air with perfect timing, can you?

Step one. Drones
For a start, you need to set your fleet ready for the show, i.e. make sure every drone is unbroken, properly configured, and nothing is missing after transporting. We at NNTC prefer to operate ready-to-use DJI drones or assemble them ourselves. 

Step two. Staging the show
It all starts with 3D modeling.

Motion graphics created in Blender, for example, is converted from animation trajectories to a format readable by the autopilot. Before going to the field, we perform thorough testing involving simulators. We put virtual instances of drones into necessary coordinates and operate them as real appliances using our software. This way we can evaluate their flight in real-time, as well as visualize the outcome in a 3D scene.

Here, have a look:

Step three. Harmony
To ensure precise movements and perfect timing, you will need a special software, for example, Drone Dance Controller produced by our vendor UgCS. The programming team worked hard on the autopilot that navigates the ballet of drones along random trajectories with accurate GPS time synchronization. The trajectories can be drawn using either a 3D computer graphics software or scripts. Now, when everything is set, all an operator needs to do is press ‘Start’ and watch the show closely.

Step four. Test
We can finally test everything in practice and see what drones can actually do. We deploy our infrastructure (ground control station and communications), arrange drones, and check if all of them are OK after transportation and can be connected to our station. The software will then automatically determine a route for each particular drone. Finally, we set a start time, and off we go!

Step five. The show
Now you’re ready. During the flight, both the operator and other people in charge need to monitor the fleet condition and, if necessary, decide to perform the emergency landing of a drone, which is out. Remember, you should mind certain restrictions before starting the show. No ‘whatever the weather’: rain or wind speed of over 5 m/s is likely to ruin the accuracy of drone’s position in the air. To communicate with drones, we need radio frequencies being rather free from other signals. Spectators need to be at a certain distance from the show venue for their own safety.

Watch how the drone show must go on:

We bring the most ambitious fantasies, ideas and dreams to life with drone and laser shows. Visit this page for more information, if you are looking for how to order a drone show, or if you want to talk to an expert and learn how the drone show will work for your occasion and venue.