Critical Infrastructure owners and operators, as well as other players in the Utilities and Services sectors spend nowadays millions of euros inspecting and monitoring infrastructures, which are often located in hard-to-reach and dangerous places. Due to the time-consuming and expensive inspection activities, the use of UAVs for monitoring purposes has contributed to enhancing this situation while cutting costs, reducing time and injuries, and also obtaining high-quality, detailed images of overhead infrastructures to look for damage, corrosion and other kinds of incidents.
Nevertheless, UAV devices are equipped with many types of sensors and gather information in real-time, but the lack of applications to manage these huge volumes of data gathered in an operative manner has been one of the main obstacles to the use of this technology for monitoring, inspecting and surveillance purposes.
According to Gartner, the Industrial inspections will represent 30% of the commercial drone market in 2020, but a technological leap has to be made in order to take advantage of the full potential UAVs have to offer for this type of applications.
E-FLY has overcome this situation by integrating Edge Computing to allow fast responses without delays in a cost efficient way that optimizes data management and analysis. As Edge Computing is now recognized as the facto execution environment for rich IoT scenarios dealing with huge volumes of data, and combined with this technology the integration of Computer Vision also enables E-FLY a distinctive advantage.
Based on E-FLY developments, Atos will develop a new service for Critical Infrastructure monitoring and inspections combining UAV, Edge and Cloud Computing Services, which will be validated on real inspection pilots on Ferrovial pipeline infrastructures.