The problem
Inspection of vertical infrastructure — transmission towers, bridge cables, flare stacks, building facades — still means rope access, scaffolding or helicopters. All three are expensive, slow to schedule, and put people at height. Manual drone inspection removed some of the risk but kept the bottleneck: a pilot and an inspector in the loop for every flight, and terabytes of footage reviewed by hand afterwards.
What the application demands
- Obstacle-tolerant autonomy — GPS-denied or degraded near steel structures, so the aircraft must fly on vision and LiDAR odometry, not GNSS alone.
- Onboard defect detection — streaming every frame to the ground doesn’t scale on site connectivity. Detection has to run on the aircraft, storing only flagged frames.
- Stable imaging — a 3 kg payload class airframe carries the gimbal, lighting and sensor head without fighting wind near the structure.
- Traceable results — each defect needs a position-tagged record for the asset management system.
Recommended configuration
| Role | Product | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Airframe | YD-Researcher 600 | 3 kg payload for gimbal + lighting + sensor, wind-resistant, open interfaces |
| Onboard computer | YD-Core NX16 | 100 TOPS for onboard defect detection; 4-camera CSI-2 input |
| Datalink | YD-Link 10 | 20 km telemetry for linear asset corridors |
The YD-Researcher 600’s payload bay mounts the inspection sensor head on standardized rails; the YD-Core NX16 runs the detection model and tags flagged frames with the aircraft’s RTK position before downlinking a summary.
From our customers
Customer references and deployment photos will appear here once confirmed.
