Industrial Drones and Comprehensive Data Analysis Pave the Way for Safer Inspections in Utility Management

In the rapidly evolving world of industrial drones, collaborations between industry leaders like Exertis Almo and DJI are setting new standards in efficiency, safety, and innovation. While Exertis Almo is recognized for its strategic move to cater to sophisticated surveillance and security solutions through expanding its product offerings, DJI has been pushing the envelope with its Mavic 3 Enterprise Series. This series, featuring advanced capabilities such as high-resolution mapping and thermal imaging, exemplifies DJI's commitment to offering comprehensive solutions that extend well beyond the hardware. The synergy between Exertis Almo's distribution prowess and DJI's technological innovation is driving forward the adoption of drone technology across various sectors, promising a future where operational strategies are profoundly transformed by aerial insights and capabilities.

These developments underscore a significant shift towards leveraging drone technology in critical sectors, from infrastructure inspection to emergency response, offering a glimpse into a future where industrial drones play a pivotal role in operational strategies.

MarketScale was on the show floor of DISTRIBUTECH 2024 and had a chance to speak to Jason Cao, the Energy Enterprise Sales Manager at DJI and Matthew Callari, the Director of Sales for Emerging Tech at Exertis Almo. They share their expert perspective on how these technologies are shaping the industry and what the future holds.

Jason's Thoughts

We're showcasing the future of possible. These are industrial drones built for heavy use. They're more rugged, a lot more automation features. It's probably one of the easiest solutions that's already being utilized right now. So we're trying to help scale up with more utility companies and showcasing all of our technology.

It's more cost effective, it's more efficient, and it's safer. Instead of sending your crews out there, putting them in high risk areas, you can have your guys just fly a drone, capture all of that data, and then make good decisions based off that drone data.

Instead of sending your crews out there, putting them in high risk areas, you can have your guys just fly a drone, capture all of that data, and then make good decisions based off that drone data.
— Jason Cao, Energy Enterprise Sales Manager at DJI

For example, on storm response, it's pretty messy. There's also areas that you might not be able to access. If you fly a drone, you can get the aerial view, and the sooner you have that information, the sooner you can go out there and perform the work that's needed to get power back up and running.

Transmission lines and their distribution lines, also their substations, solar farms, wind farms, capture LiDAR for vegetation management. Use cases are really limitless, and we're just really scratching the surface.

Within DJI, we're not just trying to provide a hardware drone, it's about offering a complete solution. And for us, we have ecosystem partners on the software side that can take all of that data, analyze it, and then create a deliverable for the customer to make something that's actually actionable.

You know, for example, you can go out there and collect a thousand images. Instead of having somebody manually scrub every single image, you can have a software, for example, our partners Thread, that can take all of that data, make it easy, comprehensible. They can automatically know, hey, these are the main issues that we're going to go address right now. So with DJI, we tried to help promote our ecosystem partners as well, because it's about really growing the industry together.

Matthew's Thoughts

So we're here at DISTRIBUTECH 2024 with DJI running the booth, kind of going over all of the different verticals that we don't typically hit. So that would be electrical, utilities, showing all of these end-users here what technology is available to them. Traditionally, they might be using helicopters or having to go out and do inspections themselves. Instead, they can use drones, which are safer, faster, and show greater ROI for those systems.

Instead, they can use drones, which are safer, faster, and show greater ROI for those systems.
— Matthew Callari, Director of Sales for Emerging Tech at Exertis Almo