Daily briefing
Skyports Drone Services, eSmart Systems and SP Electricity North West announced Project VOLT, a 12-month pilot using four remotely operated drone-in-a-box installations on part of the utility's network in England's Lake District. Skyports pilots will fly BVLOS missions from a remote operations centre more than 200 miles away, while imagery is streamed to the utility and processed through eSmart Systems' Grid Vision software.
This is a practical test of whether permanently deployed aircraft can shorten the gap between a storm fault and an engineer knowing what actually failed.
Utility teams evaluating docked drones should measure dispatch-to-image time, communications availability during bad weather, false-positive rates in automated analysis and how quickly findings enter the existing outage-management workflow.