Use Case: Increasing Mission Time for Offshore Traveling

One of the main benefits of drone technology is getting to hard-to-reach places. Whether the mission requires long distance travel, navigating complex obstacles, or going up to tall heights, drones can accomplish tasks that would be difficult, costly, or dangerous for humans to do themselves. 

A prime use case for drones is the inspection of offshore wind turbines, which are difficult to get to, very large, and often dangerous for human inspectors. To determine whether a drone is right for a given mission, it is important to look at its sensory capabilities and expected flight time, which we call Total Mission Time. As we’ve described in previous posts, the drone duty cycle is typically broken down into four components: Travel Out, Usable Mission Time, Travel Back, and Reserve.

Wind turbines can be many miles offshore, so in this use case the travel out and travel back time are quite high. As such, the vehicle will need sufficient reserves in case it encounters harsh weather conditions. This leaves a relatively small amount of time to actually inspect the wind turbine. For the mission to be considered a success, the drone will need to gather highly accurate data on the entire asset and return safely.

A typical offshore wind turbine inspection drone is designed for a Total Mission Time of 50 minutes. If the offshore wind turbine is 10 miles (16 km) from the land base station, and the drone can travel at 40 mph (64 kph), it should take 15 minutes for the travel out and travel back time. Assuming 10 minutes for Reserve, that leaves only 10 minutes for the Usage Mission Time. While 10 minutes may be enough to gather data on smaller turbines, the inspection of larger assets would likely require multiple missions or multiple vehicles.

Vertiq technology increases propulsion efficiency by 10%, made possible by the innovative control method, Field Estimated Control (FEC). This 10% increase in efficiency would increase Total Mission Time by 5 minutes (to 55 minutes). Assuming everything else stays the same, the 5 additional minutes could go directly to Usable Mission Time, meaning the amount of time dedicated to inspection would be 15 minutes (a 50% increase). Those extra 5 minutes could be the difference in completing an inspection in one trip or multiple trips.