Commercial UAV Speakers Highlight Varied Drone Usage
Photo: AUVSI.
Companies ranging from France’s railroad network to London’s sewer system are using unmanned systems for a variety of commercial tasks.
Speakers from these companies outlined their experiences — and what they’d like to see in the future — at the second annual Commercial UAV Show in London.
Oulimata Dia, project manager for UAS at France’s SNCF railroad, said the operation currently owns 10 unmanned aircraft, a mixture of fixed-wing UAS and rotorcraft, which it uses primarily for bridge inspection and maintenance work.
SNCF also designed its own beyond-line-of-sight UAS, working with an industry partner. In the future, it would like to use unmanned aircraft for vegetation control, keeping errant trees and other growth off the rail lines.
Working beyond line of sight is important to the railway, Dia said. In the United States, such work is just beginning, as last year the Federal Aviation Administration began a research effort on beyond-line-of-sight work with the BNSF railway.
In its efforts around the world, BP has used a variety of systems, both air, ground and maritime, for its oil and gas work, said Harry Casser, BP’s technology director. The oil and gas giant has used the systems for flare stack inspection, pipeline inspection, plant health monitoring, wildlife monitoring, even mapping a gravel road on Alaska’s North Slope. In that use, data from aerial systems is fed into ground systems to aid in their work.
“This data is fed into our road graders, who know precisely where to go to repair the road,” he said.
BP also has made extensive use of remotely operated vehicles under the water, as well as ground robots, both of which it uses for remote inspection.
In the future, Casser said BP would like to see additional capability for internal inspections, such as inside cargo ships. It has conducted demonstrations on using small UAS for such work, which can save weeks of time compared with doing inspections in dry dock.
France’s Areva mining company, which works primarily with uranium, has been using unmanned aircraft steadily over the past year, said Jean-Marc Miehe, the company’s geosciences techniques director.
It has used them for mapping and surveying, tasks which they can complete faster and for less money than manned vehicles, he said. However, he said sensor technology is lagging platform development, as there are not many sensors useful for geophysical use that can be mounted on UAS.
“My message is, we are a user of UAVs, but we are still missing the sensors that are of interest for mining exploration,” he said.
Many of the companies and agency representatives speaking at the conference said they are relatively new to the unmanned systems world. Among them is Thames Water, the water and sewer service that first experimented with small UAS after the area experiencing extensive flooding 18 months ago.
Jon Lorimer, a security consultant with Thames Water, said he flew his personal drone, equipped with a GoPro camera, after Thames Water spent a considerable amount of money on imagery from a manned helicopter.
The results were good enough that he was instructed to buy a system for Thames Water, which has been using drones ever since. A new sewer effort, the Thames Tideway Tunney, which would run from one end of London to the other, is being designed for possible inspection by drone, he said.
