Aerodyne – The Industrial Age of Drones and AI

Leading UAV Service Provider Aerodyne are proud to announce today that they have broken new ground on large-scale asset management and inspection projects around the world. Just over a year since they reported the completion of 30,000 inspections, the international drone-based solutions company has passed the 200,000 mark. This remarkable growth has been fueled by their development and extensive implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) to automate processes, increase efficiency and improve the accuracy of their analytics and reporting capabilities.

Aerodyne flight crews (AeroRangers) logged in excess of 185,000 man hours and covered over 38,000km as they captured visual, thermal and multispectral data from power transmission and distribution lines, telecoms infrastructure, wind turbines and more. The staggering volume of data generated was then processed by a combination of dedicated engineers and advanced AI software, before being reported to clients through Vertikaliti – a cloud-based reporting platform developed and hosted by Aerodyne themselves. Every asset inspected is available to view online with detailed prescriptive reports and geo-referenced visual data. Clients have the ability to sort and compare assets, predict failure rates, generate work orders and optimise planned maintenance routines. In addition, Vertikaliti offers communication tools for greater collaboration between stakeholders and support for better decision-making.

“I am immensely proud of the hard work, dedication and willingness to innovate that our teams have demonstrated over the last year. We are now truly delivering solutions at an enterprise level – our relentless drive to achieve greater efficiencies through the use of AI has enabled us to scale up and meet the requirements of a growing number of industries.

The real challenge has been to develop AI processes which can consistently outperform the benchmarks already in place for comparable manual methods. Now we’ve gone beyond that point and we can genuinely claim to provide a solution which is faster, cheaper and better. We are able to offer our clients effective digitisation of their entire infrastructure, with full confidence in the accuracy and delivery of the data generated.”

Kamarul A. – CEO, Aerodyne Group

Aerodyne’s AI-driven approach has been proven to be positively disruptive, perhaps most notably in their A2i-thermal automated thermal imaging analysis solution. Previous manual approaches could involve five to ten minutes of effort per image to determine and interpret the relevant data. With Aerodyne flight teams capturing up to 8,000 thermal images every day this method was clearly unsustainable. A2i-thermal intelligently processes that amount of data in 30 minutes or less, with greater accuracy and without human intervention. A2i-thermal has demonstrated efficiency improvements of up to 624,000% – effectively completing years of human work in just a few minutes.

Thermal image analysis is not the only area to benefit from Aerodyne’s commitment to optimising performance and automating processes through the use of AI.

“As our company has rapidly expanded in scale and scope, we have identified a number of limitations in existing technology and practice. Through necessity, we have been compelled to look at new and innovative ways of improving our own processes and delivering better solutions for our clients. If an off-the-shelf product doesn’t exist, or isn’t cost effective we can’t afford to wait for the market to catch up – we have to develop and implement it ourselves.

Our teams have already developed several solutions which are being used on large-scale commercial projects. We have counting algorithms which are outperforming the best third-party software, with proven accuracy levels better than 99.5% within applications in surveillance, precision agriculture and livestock management. Our AI-assisted defect detection and automated severity classification software has reduced manpower requirements by up to 50%, without negative impacts on quality or accuracy.

This is just the beginning – there are new use cases for AI-enabled drone solutions emerging every day. We are confident that, by investing in the optimisation of our own processes, we will continue to be able to disrupt new and existing industries as they move towards full digitisation”

Rossi Jaafar – COO, Aerodyne Group

About Aerodyne

Aerodyne Group (www.aerodyne.co) is a world-leading provider of drone-based enterprise solutions and a pioneer in the use of AI as an enabling technology for large-scale data capture and analytics.