Inside Unmanned Systems provides actionable business intelligence to decision-makers and influencers operating within the global UAS community. Features include analysis of key technologies, policy/regulatory developments and new product design.
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24 unmanned systems inside April/May 2016 AIR INSPECTION RESEARCH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH DAKOTA Not only is the team at the University of North Dakota Technology Accelerator visiting wind farms to perform inspections, they're also deploying UAS in their two-story engineering lab that features a 22 foot wind turbine blade section. The goal is to not only capture high quality, detailed images, but process the enormous amount of data collected into more digestible information that's valuable to the end user, said Kevan Rusk, director of the University of North Dakota Technology Accelerator. The university is working with several companies to study how to use drones to automate wind turbine inspection. "We can f y indoors and test different lighting conditions, different types of sensors and understand which high-performing sensors give more information than a visible light camera," Rusk said. "When it's the middle of winter we spend a lot of time f ying indoors and working on automatically processing whether a smudge is nothing to worry about or damage that needs repair. We've made good progress on automatic processing." The team is also working to keep the UAS platforms and payloads as simple as possible to help keep costs down, making it even more feasible to f y UAS for these inspections, EdgeData President Chris Shroyer said. These f ights should be as boring and easy as possible, he said, a job comprising a repeatable process. "Battery management is an art that we're still working on perfecting," Peck said. "You need to have enough batteries to be able to continuously f ly. Right now that's eight bat- teries per UAV with chargers. You also have to deal with wind. The maximum wind for the vehicle we're f lying is about 22 knots. And of course the wind on the ground is lighter than the wind up in the air at 250 feet." Geotagging, determining naming conven- tions and properly stitching the images proved difficult for the team at the University of North Dakota at first, Rusk said, which goes back to finding ways to processing the data collected. "The drones are taking 1,000 high definition photos within a half an hour of whitish grey pieces of fiber glass without many visual mark- ings on them," Rusk said. "We needed a system to set up the order of the imagery and stitch them together correctly so we didn't have an image from the middle of the blade intermixed with an image of the tip." The Future Until recently, many wind turbine owners didn't perform inspections as often as they should, mainly because it cost too much and took too much time. UAS offers a quicker, safer and more cost effective alternative, so wind farm owners can more easily get the information they need instead of skipping regular equipment as- sessments and hoping no damage has occurred. And the process for setting up drone-based inspections will hopefully get easier once the Federal Aviation Administration releases its regulations for small UAS. While the unsettled regulatory climate creates hurdles, Rusk said, the fact wind turbines are in rural areas away from congestion and airports makes it easier to fly UAS for this type of inspection. As the tech- nology, image processing expertise and data management capabilities improve many see using UAS becoming the standard for this type of work. Eventually the data processing algo- rithms will enable the system to tell owners the Photos courtesy of AAIR, Ascending Technologies and ING Robotic Innovation "IT'S DEFINITELY THE QUICKEST, most eff cient and cost effective way to have our blades inspected and to get a good health assessment on them each year." Justin Calcote, Buffalo Gap Wind Farm site planner