无人机巡检

We have a scheduled thermal inspection of the 50 MW solar array today. The weather is clear with light wind — perfect conditions. What's the flight plan?

I've programmed an autonomous grid flight at 30 meters altitude, covering all 156,000 panels in 12 battery swaps. The thermal camera will capture at 640×512 resolution with a 1.5 cm/pixel ground sampling distance. We're looking for three things: hot spots indicating cell-level defects, bypass diode failures, and string-level disconnections. The total mission time is about 4 hours.

Good. After the flight, how long until we have actionable data? Last time the processing took two days.

We've upgraded our processing pipeline. The onboard edge processor does preliminary hotspot detection during the flight — by the time I land after the last swap, 90% of anomalies are already flagged. The full orthomosaic with AI defect classification will be ready within 2 hours after landing. You'll get a report showing a heat map of the entire array with GPS-tagged defect locations ranked by severity. I expect we'll find about 15-20 actionable defects. We've already reduced the inspection cycle from 5 days with manual methods to 4 hours with the drone.

We're running the weekly drone survey of the site today. I need the orthomosaic overlaid with the latest design to verify earthworks progress on the access road and the substation platform. The client is questioning our progress claim of 78% on bulk earthworks.

The drone survey was completed this morning. I've processed the data into a digital surface model and compared it against the design surface using cut-and-fill analysis. The numbers: access road earthworks are at 82%, not 78% — we're actually ahead. The substation platform is at 71%, a bit behind due to the rock excavation we encountered. Total bulk earthworks volume: 94,000 m³ completed out of 127,000 m³ planned — that's 74%, close to our 78% claim.

So our 78% claim is slightly optimistic on the overall, but defensible with the road progress compensating for the platform. Let's present the drone data at the progress meeting — the orthomosaic with the colored cut-and-fill map is powerful evidence. Much better than arguing over manual survey figures. How often can we run these drone surveys?

We're doing weekly now, but we can go twice a week during critical earthworks phases. The cost per survey is about USD 800 for a site this size — that's minimal compared to the value of accurate progress data for claims and client reporting.