Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) enhances worker safety with remote asset monitoring from a desk chair
PG&E operates one of the largest and most advanced drone-based equipment inspection programs in the world and recently became the first utility in California to begin conducting fully remote drone operations for electric system inspections.
- [gentle music] It's a little new,
- beyond visual line of sight operations with the remote Dock.
- You just have to get used to
- not being there. [upbeat music]
- It's gonna be a whole new ballgame.
- Starting with our drone program back in 2019, employees take drones
- out to the field, they fly the assets, they capture the imagery.
- All right, taking off. [drone buzzing]
- Most hazardous part of their job is probably getting to the structure,
- right?
- So it's a lot of access issues. It could be, "Hey,
- we can't find this structure,"
- or,
- "The road is out."
- With the Skydio Dock, we can remotely deploy drones
- stationed at substations or other facilities for inspections,
- emergency
- response.
- You log in into Skydio Cloud, you connect to the vehicle online,
- and then you can put it in the air and capture data in matter of minutes.
- All right, launching.
- From a centralized control room, the pilot has the ability to pick
- and choose where
- he wants to fly and which assets he needs to fly without
- having to have that
- employee drive to that substation to fly that asset.
- Without a BVLOS waiver, you can't operate beyond visual line of
- sight, so you
- require a visual observer on site.
- Our recent authorization for the Skydio Dock from the
- FAA allows for full remote operations.
- With the Skydio Dock, a lot quicker response time.
- Say we do have a fault, we could send them out to look at
- that predetermined location and stream the video
- back to where a QEW lineman can look at that video and
- see it before they even have to leave their yard.
- [drone buzzing]
- Thanks to Skydio autonomy, we can navigate and operate safely in very
- challenging environments because we don't rely on
- GPS or any other sensors. Unique artificial intelligence
- algorithms, six navigation cameras, and a supercomputer on board
- provides different capabilities for the drone to operate fully
- autonomously.
- I've seen it avoid stuff out in the field, seen it get
- into tight spaces.
- There's a lot of trust being built with Skydio.
- For me, it goes seven years back when I first started.
- I've been hearing them talk about beyond visual line of sight just over and over
- and over again, but now it's finally here, and really, it's gonna
- completely change how we utilize unmanned systems.
- It's been a great opportunity for Skydio to learn how Dock
- solutions evolve those drone programs for an organization such as
- PG&E.
- I'm confident that we will have full remote operations in the future
- where drones will be living at a station, an alarm will trigger an
- event, and that drone would take off and get eyes on that risk immediately
- without
- any human intervention.
- The automation, it, it's gonna be the future.
- How much it's gonna open up the use case for drones,
- there's no ceiling.
- [gentle music]
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3 Mins 12 Secs