Power Grid Drone Inspection Service
Unlimited Range Enabled by Recharging Off Power Lines
Our Platform
We've built a platform capable of flying continuously for thousands of miles by inductively charging directly off power lines, enabling persistent and precise inspections.
It's designed to carry visual, thermal, and ultrasonic sensors to inspect a variety of maintenance concerns and identify risks to grid infrastructure.
Our Story
While at the University of Washington, we won the largest student entrepreneurship competition in the PNW, the Dempsey Startup Competition, while competing with 174 teams from 23 universities. Before that, we won the UW's Environmental Innovation Challenge.
With experience working for Seattle City Light, Boeing, Palantir, SpaceX, and building drones for the U.S. Air Force and DARPA, we plan to become the premier inspection contractor to assist utilities in managing and preventing faults on their vast networks.
Capabilities We're Building
AI/ML Inspections
We know that your team needs a prioritized list of exceptions and risk assessment, not massive volumes of raw visuals. We have built a preliminary software stack using 3D point clouds of vegetation to identify trees or foliage encroaching on lines. We are building capacity to incorporate more sensor types and utilize machine learning to identify faults and risk automatically.
Delivery
We currently deliver inspection results (.csv) via email, and plan to integrate new systems. These contain a list of maintenance action items, including date and time, allowing utilities to streamline their inspection recordkeeping. Photos and 3D models of each concern will be hyperlinked and visible on a browser.
Recharging
Our patent-pending recharging IP enables a drone inspection service that, when fully developed, would allow our system to recharge off an AC powerline of any voltage using inductive charging. While we can currently land on power lines, we're expecting to pull power in mid-September.
Autonomy
While we are manual today, we aim to build a fully autonomous platform for scale. We can currently leverage GPS waypoints for semi-autonomous flight. Avoiding obstacles and finding suitable locations to land and recharge require careful consideration. While managing risk, we'll build more and more autonomy into our operations over time.
A Demo With Your Input
As recent engineering graduates, we would be honored to showcase our capabilities. All utilities have different needs, and we're looking for your input. We are prepared to assist in pole-top, conductor, vegetation & ROW, thermal, PSPS, and spot inspections. What inspection service would you like to see conducted? We're more than happy to build a custom solution tailored to your unique needs and demo on non-critical or test infrastructure.
If your team sees potential in what we are building, we would be happy to provide an on-site demo, free of charge. There's no obligation to continue working with our team after a demo. We know rallying the resources for an on-site demo is not negligible. We would be grateful for the opportunity to demonstrate how we can help. We are committed to eliminating wildfires and strengthening the electrical grid, and would greatly appreciate any opportunity to get more on-the-ground experience.