Intro to aerial for industry
This 12-page white paper, "A business approach for using drones in the engineering and construction industries" from Accenture Consulting, provides a good basic introduction to using drones in industrial applications. It covers types of drones such as fixed-wing, rotary-wing and hybrids, and the tools they use such as cameras, Lidar, sensors and emitting systems. View the white paper here.
Accenture Consulting
www.accenture.com
Bird's eye SCADA graphics
An almost five-minute video, "Creating SCADA graphics utilizing drone technology," shows how MR Systems uses video footage from a drone to create 3D renderings of water and wastewater plants. Watch the video here.
MR Systems
www.mrsystems.com
Photogrammetry aloft
This online article, "Large scale industrial surveying via drone photogrammetry" describes how E&C firm IATEC Plant Solutions introduced drone photogrammetric survey by using a DJI Inspire 1 UAV with 12-megapixel Zenmuse X3 camera controlled by Pix4Dcapture flight-planning software and compatible DJI SDK software to conduct an aerial, photogrammetric survey of a Petrobras-UTGCA gas-treatment plant in Brazil. Read the article here.
Pix4D
https://pix4d.com
Flight best practices
The 168-page manual, "An early survey of best practices for the use of small unmanned aerial systems by the electric utility industry" by Richard Lusk and William Monday at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL), is a collection of best practices from unmanned aerial system (UAS) operators worldwide. It covers new U.S. FAA rules, mission planning, safety requirements, and UAS types, sensors and applications. View the manual here.
U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information
www.osti.gov
Inspect, survey, model
A 27-minute video, "Tech talk: applying drone technology to surveying and engineering projects," is narrated by Kurt Rasmussen, application engineer at Bentley Systems, shows how to apply drones to derive better data, and produce more accurate control, boundary and topographical surveys by using reality modeling with ContextCapture and Bentley Descartes software. Watch the video here.
Bentley Systems
www.bentley.com
Outfitted for industry
The short, online article, "DJI gives drones more power for commercial use," details how Zenmuse XT2 thermal camera and Payload Software Development Kit (SDK) can transform DJI’s drones into specialized platforms for industry. Read the article here.
DJI
www.dji.com
How to hack—and fix
A 27-minute video, "Hacking a professional drone" by IT security consultant Nils Rodday at the Black Hat Asia 2015 conference, includes a hack that exploits vulnerabilities of a drone, and compromises its security to take control. Rodday also examines fixes for remediation. Watch the video here. A slide deck of the presentation at the RSA Conference 2016 is available here.
Black Hat
www.blackhat.com
Smart UAVs do inspections
The article, "Drones and robots are taking over industrial inspection" by Will Knight in MIT Technology Review, reports that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are allowing devices to autonomously inspect pipelines, powerlines, transportation systems and other facilities. Read the article here.
MIT Technology Review
www.technologyreview.com
Drones deliver sensors
This article in InTech, "Drones in automation: secured unmanned aerial systems" by Marissa Morales-Rodriguez, Sterling Rooke, Peter Fuhr and Penny Chen, reports on drones as platforms for delivering sensors, drone operations and flight times, coordinated flight and collaborative sensing, and new FAA rules. Read the article here.
ISA
www.isa.org
