Project Overview
ASTROC AS TECH offers specialized autonomous drone inspections for critical vertical infrastructure, including wind turbine generators (WTGs), high-voltage electrical transmission towers, and cellular telecommunications masts. These operations utilize our ASTROC Edge Compute modules for real-time safe standoff distance maintenance and automated vertical flight profiling.
The Challenge
Maintaining vertical infrastructure often requires rope-access technicians or scaffolding, bringing immense height-related safety risks. Additionally, turbine downtime and network outages during prolonged manual inspections result in significant revenue losses for operators.
The Solution and Results
ASTROC implemented an automated vertical inspection flight plan. Utilizing high-zoom (optical) sensors, drones capture sub-millimeter resolution imagery of tower structures, insulators, and turbine blades while remaining at a safe standoff distance calculated dynamically by the onboard ASTROC Vision System.
For wind turbines, our Data Analytics Platform automatically detects leading-edge erosion, lightning damage, and gel coat delamination. For transmission and telecom towers, the system identifies rust, missing cotter pins, cracked insulators, and misaligned antennas. Detailed structural reports are provided within hours of the flight, maximizing uptime and prioritizing preventative maintenance scheduling.