New offshore world record: UAV blades inspection

2017 has added another feather in the cap for the Visual Working UAV inspection team that is proud to announce an astonishing NEW WORLD RECORD: 20 offshore turbines inspected in just 7.5 working hours (61 WTGs in 4 days).

VW’s chief pilot Giorgio di Marzo Capozzi, who recently outmatched 3’000 UAV flight hours and achieved the new world record assisted by Cristian Salvadori, VW’s most experienced offshore UAV technician, is all praises for his team, “Despite the high winds above 50 km/h and 1.5 meters waves making take-offs and landings very challenging, we scored 51 flights keeping a very high level of details, it’s a great result!”

The VW team once again surpass what any other conventional inspection method can achieve as rope access methods only allow up to two inspected turbines per day and ground based zoom cameras methods allowing 5 to 7 turbines inspected per day.

VW’s new generation of inspection drones is the result of over 4 years of experience operating in offshore wind farms. They are capable of carrying 51MP imaging sensors in any extreme environment and offer guidance aid to our teams during inspection thanks to a powerful onboard computer and the most advanced LiDAR sensors.
The Onboard Embedded System is also interfaced with UAV’s flight controller that combined with a proprietary ground station system allows ultimate payload control.

This record, that smashes 2016 VW’s world record of 15 turbines/day, is a great asset to the wind industry reducing turbines downtime to a minimum of 3.5 minutes per blade and at the same time eliminating safety risks to inspection personnel that now operates remotely from the vessel deck.
Significant losses of production caused by large turbine downtime are now reduced to a minimum.

With over 2’000 offshore blades inspected and a 4 years safe track record, it’s just the beginning for Visual Working and its teams that will soon uncover several groundbreaking technologies developed for the wind industry: from image processing through neural networks to lightning fast automatic inspection solutions.

Stay tuned.