Industry and Infrastructure

The Applications in Industrial Plants and in Public and Private Infrastructure – such as electricity and railway lines, road networks, bridges and viaducts, dams, gas pipelines, and water networks – represent one of the major industrial segments in the drone market.

Drones provide detailed information and high-resolution images, allowing accurate inspections of the structure itself and of its boundaries, for instance monitoring the presence of vegetation or other elements that could impede optimal operation.

Equipped with advanced sensors and without requiring scaffoldings and platforms, UAVs can detect losses and gas leaks, electrical faults and structural anomalies, acquiring useful data that will be processed by AI modules to identify critical issues. The creation of a Digital Twin of the structure allows for the exact mapping of these critical points.

For bridge inspections, autonomous missions can deploy coordinated swarms of drones. To overcome the issue of missing or degraded GPS/GNSS signals beneath bridge spans, the drones continuously communicate with each other cooperatively. Each unit maintains contact with one or more ‘master’ drones positioned in areas with excellent satellite reception, ensuring maximum precision while increasing the reliability and efficiency of the entire operation.

In addition to the quadcopters already available, the MAVTech indoor drones, currently under development, are designed for the monitoring and inspection of confined and critical spaces, such as pipelines, utility tunnels and galleries, in GNSS-denied environments.

In addition, the upcoming fixed-wing VTOL system will enable rapid monitoring of extensive linear infrastructure, including power grids, railway networks, and road systems. Drones can acquire data in dangerous and difficult to reach places, both in case of ordinary industrial plants and infrastructures maintenance and extraordinary inspections after disasters and accidents, thereby drastically reducing costs, limiting downtime, and mitigating operators’ exposure to risks such as falls, operations in critical environments, and direct contact with hazardous agents.