A faulty ceiling light is easy to spot, and all you need to change it is a ladder.
With wind turbines, however, it isn’t quite so easy to see what’s wrong, and maintenance takes place at vertigo-inducing heights. Usually, anyway.
Now a startup from Bristol is changing all that. Its self-piloting drones inspect wind turbines from the air, taking high-resolution pictures of the rotor blades from four different perspectives.
The team uses the cloud to supply clients with the images the next day. These can be analysed in detail by AI systems, allowing issues to be accurately diagnosed while also reducing the risk of accidents and lowering maintenance costs.
A similar system is already being used in banana plantations.
