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FAA exemption permits drones for oil and gas inspections

By Frank Tobe | March 16, 2015


Sky-Futures, a UK-based company offering drone inspection services to the global oil and gas industry, through their Houston office, was awarded an FAA exemption allowing their drones to fly in US air space.

The exemption allows Sky-Futures to perform infrastructure inspections of oil and gas facilities on and off shore. The drones collect HD video, stills and thermal imagery of live flare, structural and under deck platforms which are then analyzed by flare systems and structural engineers.

This type of flying visual inspection gathers digital data enabling oil and gas operators to make informed decisions with respect to asset conditions under deck, from exhausts, flare towers, and other hard to access structural areas.

In one example, the use of a drone team for this type of inspection saved over 90% of the costs of traditional rope access inspection work – work that would have required a shutdown during the inspection and the hiring of a support vessel, plus a very dangerous job for the human inspectors.

Earlier this month the FAA also exempted ComEd (Commonwealth Edison is a unit of Chicago-based Exelon – a power provider with over 7.8M customers) so that they could use UAS technology to more proactively identify problems before they interrupt power to customers. ComEd is also investigating using underground robots in manholes to inspect complex underground spaces. The robots would be deployed ahead of workers and used more routinely as the application of this technology advances.

About The Author

Frank Tobe

Frank Tobe is the founder of The Robot Report and co-founder of ROBO Global which has developed a tracking index for the robotics industry, the ROBO Global™ Robotics & Automation Index. The index of ~90 companies in 13 sub-sectors tracks and captures the entire economic value of this global opportunity in robotics, automation and enabling technologies.

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