Asset Inspection Road and Rail Corridor
Inspection and survey – post-weather event
Challenge
Safer and more efficient means to assess damage on a road network after weather events was requested by an Australian local government entity. Previously, staff crews drove the network before and after events collecting subjective information on assumed locations of interest. For any ‘off-road’ inspections, land access and potential on foot inspections were required – adding time and risk on the program.
Solution
Extending the observation area of road inspection teams without the need to place vehicle or staff in danger, Insitu Pacific has proven the technological efficiency of operating RPAS across the distributed network. Our team provided Electro-Optical and Mid Wave Infra-Red Full Motion Video to stream emergency information as and when needed, and photogrammetric data capture to inspect the road corridor down to just a few centimetres, per pixel, per image. This type of data collection delivers efficient and proactive ‘capture, archive, compare’ and predicts changes across the road network. Additional benefits of high precision georeferenced data sets is that this data can be shared with the community and other local operators, for instance rail or pipeline organisations who share Rights of Way.
Outcome
The capture activity delivered real time assessment, monitoring and video streaming capacity to decision makes, to assist with critical decision-making and longer-term planning. The activity was a step change in how crews were tasked to monitor and react to network changes. Our teams provided onsite readiness support for ad-hoc inspection tasks and on premise (in vehicle) processing of data to capture, process and interrogate information without the need for third party or offsite processing. The longer-term productivity and cost saving benefits for our client resides in the ability to monitor the network over time with flight to flight captures so that inspection, maintenance and remediation activities can be planned efficiently.