You've Never Been Inspected Like This Before

Join us for an insightful panel discussion on the transformative use of the Skydio X10 drone in asset inspections. This session will bring together experts from various industries to share their experiences and highlight how Skydio drones have revolutionized the inspection of high-value assets. Learn about the diverse applications of the Skydio X10, its advantages over traditional inspection methods, and how it ensures accuracy, safety, and efficiency in challenging environments. Whether you're in public safety, construction, or infrastructure management, discover how the Skydio X10 can elevate your inspection processes.

Alright. Well, we'll go ahead and get started here. So first off, thank you very much for attending today. This is our asset inspection session.

So if you're here for that, you're in the right place. If not, it'd be a fascinating thing to learn about. So I'm Jason Tillman, director of product marketing over here at Skydio. So really excited to be here with you today as well as our panelists that you're gonna be meeting.

So we have some experts here that are gonna share some of their real life experiences with asset inspection. So really excited for that one. But before we get started, I just kinda run wanna run through just a few short slides because I know you guys wanna really kinda hear what the panelists have to say, but we wanna kinda set the stage here. And the first one is that when we take a look at, the challenges we're facing more kind of manual inspection processes that many of you may already be facing out there already.

But what it is is that we really wanna take a look at the real challenges facing some of these. And so the first one is that when you're tasked with inspecting large complex structures and it could be buildings, it could be bridges, or it could be pretty much anything that happens to be out there, you're not just dealing with a routine checkup on this one. You're actually sending people into potentially dangerous situations. It could be small crevices you need to send them in.

It could be, like, climbing high. It could be, anything that's all the way down to putting them inside traffic or inside other kind of hazards. Additionally, the challenges really don't just slow down things. They also drive up costs because every additional hour spent on actually doing some of these inspections means that additional time and money is actually spent where it could be used elsewhere.

And then beyond that, just the immediate risk that we're actually just talking about, there's also a level of consistency that you're actually not getting there as well. And so while relying on human inspectors is great, it's been something that's been done for decades and and such, is that, even they can actually have bad days. Maybe it could be a day that they're just a little bit off, and so you really wanna get that consistency there.

That could really lead to gap inside data which could actually overall kind of really impact what the level of data you're actually getting.

And so that could lead to much more infrequent times you're actually going out and doing these inspections which could overall, the long term, actually really impact the health of the asset that you're actually looking for.

So what we want to do is we want to kind of introduce you here today to a understanding of what this could look like if you start adopting drones. And I know that we're at a drone conference, surprise, surprise, we're talking about that today, but we see this as we call this a maturity model and this is when you're moving up from the far left hand side all the way to the far right hand side. The far left hand side is where many of us are here today and this is manual inspection So we just went through some of the challenges that are associated with those. But then we start adopting more and more of the drone technology out there and that's when you start moving over to the left hand side.

So I'll move to the next one. That's the pilots with drones. That's where you have individuals who are out there. They may not be engineers.

They may not be experts out there. But what they are, they're pilots with drones. It could be a DSP that you're using, but they're going out there flying up the drone, capturing the aerial data you're actually looking for, and then the experts actually receive it and actually synthesize it and actually draw conclusions.

The next one is you have skilled frontline staff with drones and that's where you actually have folks who are perhaps engineers or folks who are, out there, lineman for example, who understand what's actually they're looking at and can make determinations on the spot and can react much faster to that. Then you need to move one more over and that's the second to the far right hand one and that's the range of skilled staff assisted by doctor drones. And so you could have the skilled experts at a remote facility and using remote operations in order to fly these drones so they don't have to go out inside a substation somewhere or a bridge way out in the middle of nowhere.

They can actually do those, inspections from the comfort of a facility elsewhere. But then if you look on the very far right hand side is that you look at automated data analysis. And this is where you can actually have the drones have preprogrammed flights that are out there. It captures the data.

And then you harness the power of AI and some of the partner solutions that you saw out here a little bit earlier yesterday. And that's where that you can actually leverage those to actually take a look at that wealth of information and data capture. It synthesizes and then it bubbles it up to you. Because if you're having tens of thousands of photos or videos that you need to take a look at, doing it yourself is incredibly time consuming.

And after you start looking at them for a period of time, you can start glazing over, it may miss something. But by using some of these more advanced solutions out there, you can actually go and have them bubble up those instances that might be something of concern and then the skilled staff does take a look at that and make a determination from there and allows that level of scale that's really unprecedented.

But when we see it as the use of drones within this environment, we have really the stages that this goes along, from a Skydio perspective as you initiate. That means you have an idea of an inspection you need to do. So of course you get the work orders actually come in, but then from there you have to plan it and you can actually do this remotely or through a controller, actually get that scheduled. Moves into capture and this is, of course, the critical phase out there and why you're using drones in the first place.

The drones go out there and actually conduct this mission, gets the high quality, imagery and video this happens to be out there. It gets synthesized and again that's where partners really play a major role. And then it moves into delivering those, reports and that those findings over to whoever the stakeholders that you're actually looking for. So again, what we want to really talk about today is how it really aligns to all these and how drones can actually really make a difference out there.

And so with that, I'll ask the panelists to come on up here. And, again, there's only we can talk about this theoretically as much as we want, but I think that actually having some of this real world examples of what these folks are actually seeing will really make a lot of sense.

So to go in and get started, do we have an extra mic for oh, there we go. Okay. Perfect. So we'll go ahead and, Mike, we'll start with you if you wanna introduce yourself and provide a little context.

Hello. I'm, Mike Spangler from Idaho Power Company.

I'm the UAS program manager, for Idaho Power. I've worked there for thirty eight a little over thirty eight years, and, I've been in charge of the UAS program now for about, six and a half years. And, we may have about, thirty pilots, twenty seven pilots to be exact, and we use primarily Skydio, very little DJI.

Those are for noncritical assets. And, we have about twenty four thousand square mile service territory in Eastern Oregon and all across Central and Southern Idaho.

And, that's about it.

Thank you.

Thanks, Mike. My name is Josh Sexton. I'm with Stantec out of Virginia. I'm the global UAS manager and the reality capture manager. We oversee about a hundred and seventy pilots. We don't have any professional pilots, but we have subject matter experts that use drones as a tool in their toolkit.

And we're operating across North America, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK currently.

And, I'm Michael Marshall. I've been with Stantec for twelve years. I'm based out of Denver, Colorado.

We're responsible mainly for bridge inspection, tunnel inspection, all sorts of different asset inspections on the infrastructure. And then we're using drones to help us, with that inspection and and give us better data for our results.

Should have a mic here.

I'm Joe Anke, director of systems engineering at Skydio. I've been here for six years working on pretty much all of our all of our products, including cameras and on x ten, getting into a lot of the technology architecture and the attachments as well.

Alright. Well, perfect. Well, thank you very much for, our panelists for coming up here today. So the first question we have to get these things opened is can you each share what kind of assets that you're actually inspecting, and then how do you go about actually conducting those?

Yeah. So at Idaho Power, we're a heavy hydro, based, utility. And, so we have a lot of hydropower plants that we inspect, a lot of flumes, raceways, dam, dam safety inspections that we do, a lot of lines, transmission, distribution lines.

We we do a lot of river engineering work, surveys, stream, riverbank, erosion, that type of thing, do a lot of mapping.

And, traditionally, a lot of this stuff that we did, the inspection was really just people in four wheel drives, four by fours. They were, four wheelers on foot, and it's just a really labor intensive process.

And, and so same thing with all of our dam safety. You're putting people in, very dangerous situations.

Terrain is hazardous. So, anything we could do to get, people out of those scenarios, that's where drones really, have have played a big part.

Excellent. Thank you.

For Stantec, we're an A and E firm, so we run the gamut. We do survey and mapping, specifically throughout the globe, but we also do a lot of asset inspection. We do nature based solutions, environmental services. So you're looking at everything from overhead structures, maybe you're looking at mining loadout areas, shipping, rail, transportation, bridges, dams.

We're creating two d orthos, three d orthomosaics, three d models every day, and that's how we're using drones.

Yeah. So I'm mainly on the bridge side. So we're doing a bridge inspection once every two years as mandated by the FHWA.

And we do everything from manual inspections. It's a team of two, to something with a snooper truck or a bucket truck, rope access underwater. We'd basically, anything we need to get onto the bridge. And now we're introducing drones as well. So, again, using, all these types of manual assets, to inspect, both tunnels and bridges.

Great. This is a good one for me to be at the end of the line on. I think the answer is a little bit of all of the above for Skydio engineering. We have to meet all of our customers' use cases.

I put up a couple pictures, can actually go to the next one, of a few things that I'm really excited about and things that X10 is doing really well at. So for transmission, distribution, and poles, these can be really difficult to get the depth of field across long spans, getting focus correct, getting your whole image and all the detail that you need, sometimes not being able to get the exactly as close as you wanna be able to get to, and Xcent's doing a great job at this now.

For thermal radiometric solar, we're using map capture.

Our new thermal camera in X ten is doing a great job, has really high thermal sensitivity. In this photo, you can actually see some cell level defects at almost four hundred feet, which is well beyond most people's specs, and it just gives you the ability to get more per capture when when you're doing these these types of inspections.

Last year, doubling down here on bridge inspection, especially using three d scan. These can be really tough.

When you are getting under a bridge, maybe don't have GPS, lighting conditions can be difficult. You can have mixed lighting situations where there's bright background, maybe the sun up there, and using the all the power of the cameras and HDR features to to pull out all the features you need when we're doing these inspections.

Great. And so, one of the big things that we see is change management. And so when you actually go through and change from more traditional methods of inspection over to the use of drones, like, what sorts of pushback did you get within your organizations, when you wanted to start using drones for these kinds of inspections?

Yeah. So initially, with our group, you know, if you if I take the distribution transmission patrol group, they've been doing the same thing the same way for so long.

And, you know, some of these guys, you know, I kinda joke around that you could give them a vessel that would travel at the speed of light, but they're gonna still pedal a bicycle.

They just are so used to doing things the same way. And then when we started out, we had a lot of pain points really with the first s two and the iPad.

All the stuff to set it up, they really didn't want to use it because it took longer to set it up, than it did, and the range wasn't very good. So then I had a lot of pushback.

Mhmm.

And, and so big change when we went to s two plus enterprise and and x twos.

So it's just kind of a lot of, getting getting the group used to using it and and kind of forcing it on them a little bit. And, and, eventually, you know, they've come around, and they see the benefits of it.

So it's pretty easy now.

Excellent.

I'm gonna talk about kind of the corporate, pushback that we may have.

Just the risk associated with it. It's a new technology. When you're flying drones, we have to have regionally certified pilots wherever operating. In this room, we're probably all from North America, but here, it's the FAA one zero seven or Transport Canada. You know, in getting folks trained and having your corporate, oversight, legal counsel, everyone, on board that you're accepting the risk to use drones. And I'll let Michael talk about the client side.

And, yeah, from the bridge inspection side, we're still, need to have those manual inspections. Our FHWA mandate is to have at least two people on-site, typically, and and to have that person, have that engineer, or have that team leader, conducting that inspection. So when we introduced drones, when we saw the, this the slide, I guess, of, the different phases of drone inspection, we're not technically allowed to go to that remote inspection yet in the bridge world.

But we're finding ways to to to push ourselves that way and, and to keep advancing this technology and and using it in in creative ways.

And on the engineering side of this, we take these, pushback and boundaries as a challenge to give you the the technology that that gives you the right the right answers for those challenges. So that comes down to autonomy. No matter where you are on the spectrum of manual capture to fully dock based autonomous capture, you need to be able to trust the platform to be able to do all the obstacle avoidance or complete the man, autonomous capture on its own. Auto modes, getting the right exposure, focus on every capture so you're not having to worry in the field about getting your settings right or adjusting them for the environment on that day. And also just the overall image quality, getting our color right, sharpness, denoise, all perfect. So every time you take a capture, you're getting the details that you need for that asset.

And when you're going through and you do this transition, there's always, like, things that surprise you along the way. Is there anything that surprised you in the transition over to drones? Because, of course, it's fairly big having someone actually maybe do walk the line and actually look to see it, everything there, going into the bridge manually, switching over to drones. Like, what was the most surprising thing for you?

I'd say probably the most impressive thing was, just the the the data that we're getting from them, the real time intelligence that helps us make better decisions Mhmm. In the field.

People can see that. It's immediate.

Also, just the rate that we are able to adopt them within our different organizations. So we have river engineering folks. We have corp comp folks. Lot of different lot of different groups using them, but it's just really that immediate feedback, real time, high definition photos that you can look at, review.

I think that's been probably the biggest.

Excellent.

Yeah. I'm gonna echo everything that Mike said. You know, having that actionable visual intelligence, you know, was the first light bulb moment, but also empowering our staff. Giving them a tool that kept them out of buckets, off ropes, that improve their quality of life. We're talk a lot about safety. Safety is important to all of us. And being able to allow people to work in the field longer.

With drones, we're able to take people in harsh environments and extend their work life, exponentially because their level of effort has decreased so much. They're no longer out in the hot sun walking miles each day. A lot of times, they can deploy a drone and collect even better data than they were before. So that's one of the, the biggest points to me is just empowering our staff and improving their ability to collect data and their quality of life.

Yeah. And for me and before we get to the video, for us, we're coming from an age of paper and and pictures, essentially, when we do bridge inspection. So my deliverable to the client is is a written report with, you know, anywhere between ten to thirty pictures.

But to take that to the, to the next level oh, one more.

Maybe.

It it might have been back. What was the back? A few.

Two more?

No. It's the video.

Oh, sorry. It's the video. I'm not sure where that was. It might be further out. It might be near the end.

It's kind of frozen up.

Yeah. We but fix that up. So it's the power of going to, like, a three d model approach and being able to take your client, to the site and then, put the put the defects essentially, in right in front of their eyes and and not just, there you go.

Not just on paper or one single picture, but, oh, one more.

It's probably after that one as well. Not this one.

There we go.

There we go.

Yeah. So take it's to take the client into their bridge, essentially. So some of these sites are are remote sites. They can be difficult to get to, and and to bring them into that environment and show them where their maintenance needs are, show them where their hot spots are, is all more powerful than just reading it on a piece of paper or looking at twenty photos.

So, I think this is, the biggest surprise and and biggest transformation of our work.

Biggest surprise for me always is no matter how many new features, how much new technology and autonomy we we pack in that, like, the amount of importance there is on just nailing the basics. And if you can't get the basics down right, then the product's really not usable. So often this, leads us to focus a lot on our user interface, bringing out camera settings that you might need to get to if you get into an environment that's tricky, optimizing wireless and just making things easy to set up and use, all of the time.

And, I I guess the next question here is for Joe in particular is, from the engineering perspective, like, what software advancements have been critical for these inspection use cases?

Yeah. Few things. I could I queued up, three photos. That was the the first one that that was next in line before we went back.

So we'll be back quite a bit.

But, yeah, a bunch of new technology went into X ten, one more back, and that's the right one. Okay. So we completely revamped the autonomy architecture, autonomy cameras, the image signal processors, and all of the color cameras.

So this first photo is showing our image signal processor's ability to process sixty four megapixel photos and allow us to do multimodule transitional zooms. So this gives you ability to get far away from your assets, and still get the detail that you need or get in really close, and get just sort of an unprecedented level of detail down to, like, point three millimeters of of GST.

Beyond that, we knew we were gonna go to autofocus modules.

So here, what you're seeing is like, the the conventional way of doing autofocus based on contrast just contrast isn't performing enough for for a lot of capture if you're trying to do it efficiently. It it fails. It fails in low light, and it can be slow and won't have, like, these hunting effects. So we went to a phase pixel based multi window approach.

And and what this allows us to do is in real time sort of score our image, focus and sharpness across the field. So then we can instantly snap to the best focus after we evaluate the actual ROI of our subject or where where we think, like, the the thing is that we wanna capture. This gives you the ability to be moving while keeping perfect focus and not hunting around as well as in manual modes, not have to deal with tapping and getting into manual modes. And even in low light, this this should work pretty pretty well.

Lastly, the thermal camera, we completely revamped the architecture and moved all of the processing off the module and onto our image signal processor.

This gives us the ability to do radiometric thermal processing and gets us access to the latest AGC algorithms.

You're gonna see a huge boost in performance on thermal imaging. Here, you're sort of seeing delamination on a bridge early in the morning, something that you just can't see with color cameras. This also gives us the ability to do use case based, tuning, and we'll build out profiles on x ten. Today, you'll see recon profile and inspect profile, so you could pick the right tuning profile for the job that you're doing, doing. And then lastly, since everything's on our ISP, we can continue to algorithms and build out more tuning profiles and release those quarter over quarter as software releases.

And, you know, I I know you've just actually run through some of the things that we've done for development of the x ten in particular for these inspection. But I'd love to hear from the other panelists. What about Skydio drones in particular have really kinda stood out in terms of things that have been very helpful for you with these inspections?

I guess, really, the one of the biggest features for me is, I do a lot of thermal inspections. So, having a really good radiometric thermal camera now. Thank you. Welcome.

Six forty five twelve, it it's it's a game changer for us because it saves a lot of time. I can get pixels on the target, without having to walk all the way to to the asset.

I can also maneuver it around, and get where I need to get into position to reduce my reflectivity.

So that's just a a huge thing for me. And then also just the, obstacle avoidance, which everybody knows about, just makes it a lot easier, safer to fly in the wire environment.

And, I think those are really the features that stand out for me and impact me the most.

K.

So, corporately, for me, looking at it as a a program manager, the Skydio platform is really safe to operate, you know, and that's what we've always talked about, collision avoidance. I'm gonna let Michael talk about NightSense a little bit. We've got a video to queue up there. But one of the use cases that I use for Skydio a lot, and it's through all the Skydio lines, is the scout mode.

We do hydrostatic pressure testing over water. Having the ability of the drone to track the controller and be in front of a boat, while you're transiting fifteen, twenty miles an hour over a large body of water to do hydrostatic pressure testing, is phenomenal. And we do documentation of construction sites the same way. And that's, you know, a fairly novel use case.

It's low hanging fruit. It's video. But it takes the pilot load off. You can actually focus on the controller, see what you're doing, and collect the data you need.

And then if you do have a area, you've got the triangulation, so you can report back and you can livestream that feed. So it's very helpful, and I actually use scout mode quite a bit.

Might have you see if you can pull up the second video for me.

That one's gonna be after the the last one.

Okay.

But while he's pulling that up, Down a few more.

Yeah.

Keep that.

While he's pulling that up, yeah, for us is, again, obstacle avoidance. You know, what most drone pilots try to avoid is is sites that I'm trying to inspect. So the obstacle avoidance is is is something that, is really important to us. And then also the night sense, that we've introduced to some of our projects, we inevitably get into tunnels and and and culverts, similar to this. This is done completely at night. And then now being able to produce a model, for that asset, with zero zero lighting only produced by the drone, is is a huge game changer for us. Because you can imagine now we can, again, take our clients into this atmosphere and, one that we would only do with maybe ten pictures or so.

I can add to that a little bit.

I have a if you go back to to my first video, sort of summarizing all of that together, you'll see to set this up a little bit in this video, you'll see the screen go black.

And it looks like the cameras are failing, but that's actually us turning the gimbal light off, and then it's gonna turn back on.

So you'll see with the light on, this is you're getting pretty good detail, completely dark environment, autofocus converges as soon as the light comes back on. We're flying with the non visible night sense here in a GPS denied environment, so completely, pitch black and still able to get really, really nice detail, in in like a garage or indoor type environment with no light.

Great. And and one of the things I've been hearing, at least previously earlier on was the impact of drones on safety inefficiency. Like, what have you seen from your perspective in terms of how the technology has helped on those fronts?

Yeah. You know, it's just there's so many hazardous conditions that you put your personnel in to do these traditional inspections that, it is just really the use of a drone has really, enabled us to get away from some of those situations, when you're inspecting penstocks, even, you know, transmission towers. There's just a lot of areas where you can now take that person out of that dangerous situation.

But we have a lot of other other things that happen with them too. You know, we we avoid a lot of negative touch points with customers on large irrigated fields when we need to get to our assets.

So there there's a lot of impacts that the drone have that are positive, for operations, but primarily, the safety aspect of not putting somebody in a dangerous situation, and and, really, that's a game changer. So, you know, we're just increasing the use of our drones more, and I think we'll see, more adoption as time goes on. But, I'd say that's really probably the the key points there is, is gets our people out of a dangerous situation.

Okay.

Yeah. I would just echo that. You know, before we would put, folks on conveyors in a mining environment, maybe it's very caustic and a lot of that catwalks really de degraded. Now we can do a drone, if nothing else, with the first pass.

But with the Skydio drone specifically in GPS denied environments, you know, if we have a condition that may be immediately dangerous to life and health, we can actually drive fly that drone into a building now and take a first pass. And maybe we can see, you know, what kind of materials we have in that building. We can read labels.

We can put the drone at a minimum in an environment before we put a human there, and that's critical to keep everyone safe.

Yeah. And to echo that with safety, you know, the most critical part of a deck and where asset management begins is the deck of the bridge. And that's typically the hardest to inspect. You're trying to do it from a shoulder area, typically, during live traffic.

We don't like to shut bridges down. We'd like to keep the public moving. But now to add a drone to that situation, we can pull somebody off of that bridge deck, pull them out of that, that harm area, and, also get a bird's eye view of that deck and and actually get more information from the draw itself. So, efficiency and safety both combined in one.

Awesome.

I think you guys all kinda nailed it, but, yeah, we're we're thinking about autonomy, making it work flawlessly all the time.

And then beyond that, this optionality to get further away and get your detail or get close and get more detail kind of covers most customer use cases we're finding.

And so when you take a look at the future of asset inspections, you know, again, kind of putting the crystal ball to find out where it's gonna be, where do you see the future of that involving particularly when you look at, like, drone technology?

Well, I think we're we've seen it, you know, yesterday with the with the new dock.

I think, really, that's the future, for a lot of our work in up in my industry Mhmm.

Is being able to just autonomously launch from a remote location anytime you want to to inspect.

And I I really think that that autonomous remote operations is is the future and and where everything's headed. So, for us, I know we're really looking at that. We don't have any docks at this point. Mhmm. But we're really looking at that hard and and and substations, power plants, and we'd like to try to incorporate that in our PSPS process, for our welfare mitigation.

So I I really think that's that's the direction we're going.

And and very much just like going back to that maturity model as well. It's like some agencies, organizations may be at the manual, and that's where they're at right now. There's no, like, final place you need to go. It really depends on where your outcome is. So, yeah, very much like what are your needs and how do you actually go through then where along that model are you?

Oh, where where are we in the model?

No. No. I'm just saying, like, it it just really depends on what your situation is.

So And, you know, and, too, the thing that I wanna bring up about the doctors, companies out here that have really been, forward with that Mhmm.

And have invested a lot of time and resources to it.

But it's really gonna help us guys that are kinda following along Mhmm.

Because they're really setting processes and standards, that that make it a lot easier for us to integrate.

Mhmm.

So For us, we're looking at, you know, cadence capture, and we're moving from static deliverables to virtual twins and, ultimately, digital twins that are connected with IoT sensors.

So setting up data acquisition standards, how we're gonna control this for the next decade so that it's repeatable. And then the level of detail that we need, if we're doing machine learning analytics, you know, we're striving for one millimeter GST. So we have to decide this is how we're gonna capture everything, moving forward. So our analytics will actually work. But, ultimately, for us at Stantec, one of our strategic initiatives is to go from static deliverables to those paper deliverables that, Michael was talking about to a virtual twin to a digital twin that has integrated sensors.

So we can, you know, tell our story better, understand asset management better, start performing predictive analytics and change detection, and that's ultimately where we wanna go.

Yeah. And that I'm gonna go off of that. The other part of it is we we really can't get away from manual inspection in some sort of, sense with bridge inspection, but we can start with a baseline model. And that's where I wanna see it go is is to start your inspection with a model maybe driven with AI, and that inspector now is just a quality control agent out on-site, finding the things that maybe the the drone or that the model couldn't find, but getting all those, checkboxes ahead ahead of time.

And the other place I'd like to see it go with remote ops is, having we have a lot of natural disasters, bridge impacts, and things like that. Having some of those remote ops available to us to to see if the bridge is is in critical condition before we can get there. Because many times, it's a it's a plane flight. It's a four hour drive.

It's it's a long ways out. But if we have a remote op that can get there within minutes to see how the bridge is behaving, that would be all the more powerful for the clients.

Awesome.

I'll set up one more video.

And I think just pretty much adding on to what everyone just said here, the culmination of all this technology bringing together dock and remote ops, x ten, high quality cameras, RTK PPK attachment, cloud integrations, photogrammetry tools basically gets you this towards this ability to start getting real time digital twins. And we're we're just gonna keep chipping away at that, and that's that's kinda how we see the future.

Perfect. So just wanna open it up for questions from those inside the audience here. Anything that you would like to ask any of our panelists?

Absolutely.

Sure. This question is for the Michael, the Scintech personnel.

Sir.

Thank you very much. So question for Michael, Stantec Bridge Inspection.

I'm Sean, California Department, Transportation Bridge Inspection.

We saw some really cool three d models of structures there, tunnels and bridges and all that stuff.

Are is that part of your normal workflow for your clients, or is that a special occasion thing?

I wouldn't say it's a special occasion.

It is starting to integrate into our normal workflow. As you know, you know, inspecting maybe five to ten bridges in a day, that's that's not economical or efficient. But there are bridges that we find that are, that can benefit from this type of, from this type of modeling or AI. So I wouldn't say it's, completely taking over, just for everyone's information. The state of Colorado I live in, over eight thousand, nine thousand bridges that we have to inspect once every two years. And I know they've probably even more in California here. So to to do a model of every single bridge in your in your entire inventory, it's just not realistic.

So the first step is to is to assess which bridges can benefit from this and which bridges, get the biggest bang for the buck for that. So I wouldn't say it's it's part of the workflow, but it's not, completely engulfing every bridge.

Yeah. For us, it's, definitely well, we haven't even gotten into three modeling, on the maintenance inside yet. Construction people are playing with that. But right now, for bridge inspection, we are really using it as as an extension of of a digital camera for pictures and videos of places that bridges we can't find or we can't easily get to or we would need a rope or a snuba truck.

And so I'm just curious to know what the qualifying factor are, to go beyond in other departments and companies' judgment.

Yeah. Well, step one is many of our inspectors now, we're trying to carry drones with us at all times. The two plus, essentially, in your backpack is the is the best tool to have on a bridge inspection site. Because, again, getting to to not have to put a snooper on to mitigating how much a snooper needs to be used, that that's the ultimate tool. But then going back to the three d modeling question, it's it's more about, one, you don't wanna model a bridge that just is in perfect condition, a brand new bridge.

It looks beautiful, and everyone loves to see it, especially at one of these, conferences. But what what a benefit are you getting as an asset manager? Not much.

So one is to find out, you know, the age of the what types of defects the bridge has, the size, and and what types of, hurdles do we get by inspecting that bridge. So I say there's a lot of factors, and then it's it's trying to pick and choose between those.

Perfect. Any other questions? Oh, we have one in the back here.

Hi. Eric Martin from Southern California Edison. The, question is, how are you interacting with your leadership when you bring these new ways of looking at your assets, and have you made any determinations that weren't needing to be backed by human eyes with this information?

For me or for Anyone.

Any anyone in that question, I guess.

Sorry.

At the beginning of the line.

Can you repeat the last part of that question, please?

Yeah. I'm just curious. As we get more is the drones get more sophisticated with the fidelity and and you can see so much with it. How is it, being received by leadership as as a viable source to check the box of we did our job without it sending a human out, I guess, is what I'm kinda getting at.

Yeah. And and that's a tough one because, we are not rolled out in a full time aerial inspection, program yet. We still do majority of our inspections by foot patrol and such, and and helicopter.

But, you know, I do know the fact that when we done a little proof of concepts and we push that back up, you know, they're just amazed of what they can see.

But, it also brings up its own set of challenges, because we can quickly, overwhelm our resources from our regions, our operating regions.

And, and also then and then now we're really on a clock, to get those repairs made, and then so that is a dollar amount. Right? So, I mean, it's just generally very positive because in the end, we're trying to prevent ignitions from happening, but it has its own set of challenges, and we're we're kinda working our way through that right now.

Nothing's you know, we're not nearly as far along as you folks in California.

Excellent. Yeah. I was just curious about in for you as well, the, like, remapping portion of it.

Like, pretty impressive.

Like, seeing this seeing defects basically, you know, but I am just curious, like, how do you feel incorporating that into your check the list that's inspected?

Yeah. So it's it's kinda twofold, I would say. So on the three d mapping side, when you're when you're able to produce a model like this, a lot of times in a bridge inspection report, you're seeing the defect. You're seeing what what's wrong with my bridge?

What's wrong with my asset? And with a model like this, you can typically go in back and find what was the cause of that defect. How where where's my maintenance? Yes.

I can go patch this spall, but what caused that spall to happen? So it's about following your trail of breadcrumbs, and I think that's where that box gets checked. The other one on the non three d modeling side, the two plus, we've had clients that, the the logistics and the cost of just closing down the bridge to get a snooper on it, to to get all the resources on that site are just impossible.

To put that two plus between steel girders and go look at welds, go look at details, and get within three feet of your asset even closer, that was the biggest checkboxes, is to find things that not even manual inspection was able to find in some cases. Or, manual inspection just couldn't be done.

Hi. Jamie from DeepTech Solutions. Just wanted to know I didn't see the tunnel or maybe I missed it. What kind of challenges do you face, when you're doing the tunnel inspection with props? So often in, like, tunnels, mines, lots of dust. Just not a place I've done a lot of lot of inspections, just maybe some takeaways from that kind of experience. But I suppose you don't have many alternatives in that GPS in that environment.

Yeah. If you wanted to click the slide, I think it's the very next one.

Yeah. Exactly what you said. It's it's dust. It's the light, I think, is the biggest factor. And the amount of, the amount of resources you need just to make those inspections is is quite substantial. A lot of but I would say night sense is what we're kind of working with to to help bring those resources back to just a two person team or just a drone pilot, and then putting the drone in harm's way, not necessarily our inspection staff. Is that your point?

What are you doing before?

Again, just a regular inspection team. So manual inspection. Yep.

Any other questions?

Nope.

This is a loaded question. Aaron Chamberlain, Caltrans.

So on that subject of standards, I heard you mentioned, you know, the one millimeter GSD.

What are you seeing as far as the national framework for that as far as how how does that scale? Right? So it works for you for Stantec. You guys can develop your own standards.

Right? But how are you seeing that, scale towards the entire industry? You know? It could be bridge.

It could be, energy, whatever.

You know, we don't have, you know, we have ASPRS standards for, you know, Navy or mapping. We don't really have anything for any of these other case uses yet because the the technology is relatively new.

I'll answer that.

You know, I think that's something, as the industry develops, we're gonna have to develop those standards. And coming from DOTs, transportation authorities, regulatory authorities, they're ultimately going to have to set the standard. But we do need to have that conversation because the technology is new. And everyone right now wants a digital twin or a virtual twin or a three d model.

But we haven't defined that really well because everyone has a different definition for it. So coming together at conferences like this, discussing it, understanding that we do need to have data acquisition standards, that just because the drone will go out with uncontrolled photogrammetry and create a beautiful model, should you? You know? If you wanna do this over a decade, we need to programmatically decide how we're going to do that and set the standards upfront, not just create one great model and then walk away from it.

So exactly what you said, we have to have, state standards, federal standards for this, and we have to have that conversation.

Any other questions?

Alright. With that, I'd like to thank our panelists for coming up here today and taking some time out of their busy days and, appreciate you, the audience, for coming out here as well. So thank you very much.