The National Grid of The United Kingdom has been using drone surveillance to monitor the status of the nation’s physical network. The job of these drones is to inspect the network of 7,000+ miles of overhead cables that span across England and Wales.

The management of such scale of national infrastructure demands a lot of data analysis which the National Grid plans to undertake using AI (Artificial Intelligence) and machine learning. This will help in processing the huge amount of data that is being sent to their servers by the drones. They plan to use drones as an aid along with human surveillance on the ground to maintain their grid. Just like other cases of process automation in the software industry, the National Grid wants to leverage machine learning to reduce the amount of information that their employees need to manually review.

“The system will determine the condition and overall health of the assets. It will send the information about whether anything needs to be repaired or replaced. This system is being developed as a prototype. When we mention digitization, we mean real engineering kind of stuff that we are planning to execute,” said John Pettigrew, the CEO of National Grid. Innovations like the use of drones and machine learning in infrastructure management are pivotal to the future of infrastructure operators like theirs, said Pettigrew.

The group of six drones supplied by DJI relies on video and IR cameras to closely examine the corrosion of pylons, the strength of the steel, and electrical faults such as malfunctioned conductors or frayed cabling. This project just began a few months back and the National Grid is currently working with Keen AI, a UK-based firm, to develop their technology.

The National Grid is keen on implementing this system to control their operational costs by using a small fraction of their profits towards developing this new technology.   Sharing a security warning for this project, the Chief Scientist at McAfee, Raj Samani, said: “As more businesses start using drone technology for helping with daily monitoring and surveillance, it becomes imperative to ensure tight security, even more so in cases where the nation’s infrastructure is under question.”  This is only the beginning for drones to monitor infrastructure. We can expect more countries and more industries to begin adopting this new technology.