Using an off-the-shelf drone connected to Sterblue’s mobile app, the company performed an exterior inspection of a power plant’s hyperbolic cooling tower concrete shell at a major American utility’s site, which they began working with when they were selected through Electric Power Research Institute’s (EPRI) Incubatenergy Labs program. With a height of around ~330ft (~100m) and a diameter ranging between 164 and 246ft (50 and 75m), inspecting a cooling tower is not an easy task. However, in over three days, Sterblue uploaded around 10,000 pictures to its cloud platform, where dedicated AI models automatically detected and quantified cracks, spalling, and other anomalies in the concrete infrastructure.

Read the full article at Commercial UAV News.