Company Name : The Drone Guys
Funding Source & Value : EI Innovation Voucher – 5k
Project Title : Computer Vision Analysis for Drone Inspections
Profile of Company : The Drone Guys are Irelands leading Drone services company offering a broad range of services ranging from Drone Aerial Photography, Filming, Surveying, Inspections and Thermal Imaging to their extensive client base.
Problem to Be Solved: The Drone Guys deploy drone to perform inspections on wind turbines by taking high resolution images on major components and post process it in accordance to the client needs. Manual inspections on wind turbine blades through images are required from time to time to evaluate the extent of the structural damages or defects on the blades. The company wish to obtain an autonomous system to help streamline the process and support the staff in evaluating the state of the wind turbine blade efficiently.
How Gateway Delivered Solution for Industry: CREDIT Technology Gateway is involved in the development of a bespoke machine learning model focusing on rapid detection of defects on high volume data of wind turbine blades. This involves investigation and in-depth analysis to identify distinctive features and characteristics on defects, a crucial step in training a robust machine leaning model. Tuning hyperparameters of the neural network and streamlining the network architecture is a big key in optimizing and increasing the accuracy level of the performing model. Current iteration of the solution can segment the defects down to pixel-by-pixel resolution and provide accurate classifications on the structural health of wind turbine blades.
Impact for the Company: The company have obtained a prototype model that can perform semantic segmentation on high volume data detecting defects and achieving quick turnaround time on obtaining the inferenced results. Generating reports and tracing of the affected blades are conducted autonomously and it works hand in hand with the company’s experts to evaluate the health of the wind turbine blades more efficiently by minimizing risk such as misclassification due to fatigue introduced by the repeatability of the task.
Company Testimonial
Niall Carroll – Director: “CREDIT Technology Gateway were involved in the development of an innovative bespoke machine learning model focusing on rapid detection of defects on high volume data of wind turbine blades. Going forward Drone Guys would like to build on the excellent research to help streamline the technology and further refine and automate the process of drone inspection and evaluation of defects. The whole process of engagement on the project was straightforward and highly rewarding ”