Improves Safety And Cuts Inspection Costs Up To 50 Percent, Company Says

Cell tower inspections, the majority of which are still conducted manually, are both expensive and dangerous. Manual cell tower inspection is in fact among the most dangerous jobs, outnumbering in deaths per 10,000 workers both police work and logging. As the industry approaches a transition to 5G technology, the number of cell towers is expected to increase dramatically.

Studies show that automated workflows have proven their potential to reduce the death toll to zero and to cut inspection costs by as much as 50 percent. Now, Lucerne, Switzerland-based Drone Harmony has developed an automated capture app tailored for cell tower inspections.

While the hardware has been around for a couple of years now, the related software ecosystem has been lacking, leading to slow and cumbersome workflows from data acquisition, through digital model creation to report generation, thus eating up of the aforementioned promised reduction in costs. Furthermore, large site owners were reluctant to deploy drones at scale due to the lack of country-wide service providers, or simple enough end to end solutions that could be integrated into their own on-site activities.

This app is based on the Drone Harmony mission planning framework, featuring the scene-centered workflow, 3D planning environment, obstacle avoidance and more. Missions for flying the tower with a number of capture methodologies can be automatically generated for the defined tower. A simple positioning calibration tool allows you to achieve pinpoint accuracy. Finally, we have stripped the app down to the simplest interface possible, but which still allows performing complex tower scans with a click of a button. Using it literally requires minimal experience with drones and a half-hour training session.

(Image from YouTube video posted to the Drone Harmony blog)

FMI: blog.droneharmony.com