Article first published on March 21st, 2019.
Sterblue has made a new step in its conquest of the French sky with Enedis - French national grid.
After rolling out successfully a large inspection project consisting in inspecting ~500km of electrical distribution grid using Sterblue automatic flight in Bourgogne French region, we are extending our range to an additional region — Pays de la Loire.
Patrick Cornu from the Enedis Maintenance Team dedicated to vegetation and helicopter operations, was on field with us. Despite the capricious weather, Sterblue automatic flight software has proved again its efficiency in acquiring grid inspection pictures.
In only several hours, Sterblue Global Operation team managed to cover 10km of distribution grid in the scope of the demonstration.
The rain, a strong wind and the drone out of sight haven’t been sufficient reasons to trigger any sign of stress or anxiety on Nicolas’ — Sterblue COO — face.
With the Sterblue automatic flight mode on, all he had to do was watching the poles and potentially directing the camera more precisely into some specific parts of the poles!
“We are very interested in this experimentation. This interface can allow us to be much more efficient in finding anomalies on our electrical distribution network and therefore to serve more quickly before the outage.” Patrick Cornu, Enedis Maintenance Team
Once the pictures are collected, our job is not over. We optimize the whole process of asset inspection & integrity assessment to finally deliver some actionable data. What we are reaching right now with Enedis - Pays de la Loire is an ambitious but realistic objective: build a business case to massively trigger the transition from the current costly inspection process to a new optimized process relying on drones, Sterblue automatic flight & AI defect automatic detection!
Next episode of the conquest coming soon…
