J-Power (Headquarters: Tokyo), a power producer and KDDI (Headquarters: Tokyo), a telecommunications operator, announced on October 7, 2020, that they had conducted a drone demonstration test at J-Power’s Tomamae Winvilla Wind Farm from September 1, 2020 to September 30, 2020.
The drone was equipped with auto-flight software that was manufactured by Drone Base (Headquarters: Tokyo), a drone software developer.[1] The software enables the drone to automatically capture images of wind turbine blades when they are in shutdown mode. The demonstration test showed that the drone was able to capture images of all three blades of a wind turbine from four different directions in one flight. The captured images were then uploaded to a cloud server along with additional data, such as positioning and altitude information. It took approximately 20 minutes for the drone to capture images of each wind turbine, which means that the drone reduced inspection times approximately 90% compared with conventional manual inspections.
Based on the results of the test, J-Power and KDDI will continue to advance their automated drone inspection methods by utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI), robots, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.[2]
[2] https://www.jpower.co.jp/news_release/2020/10/news201007.html