Drone solar panel inspection is becoming more and more feasible, and here’s why [case study]
PCL Construction is the largest construction company in Canada, and one of the largest in the United States. It’s drawn an impressive amount of business on the simple premise of building success for its clients. The company tackles projects ranging in size and scope, bringing to life the goals of their customers through an innovative approach. Drone data has been integral to all of this lately. So when solar construction projects started showing up on the radar, of course PCL was interested in them. But there was just one problem when it came to drone data capture.
“Once we started running regular flights, we quickly realized we weren’t going to make it with the quadcopters or the multirotors,” said Sean Maland, Surveyor and UAV Pilot at PCL.
Even with a larger, leading-brand multirotor, the PCL team saw that they wouldn’t be able to keep up. After all, solar field construction projects are not like standard building workflows. They’re repetitive and demand reliable data to conduct daily monitoring.
- Tracking construction progress
- Canada
We had the understanding of drone operations, but we didn’t have the right drone. That’s when WingtraOne came in. We started to look at your website, and we saw what you can achieve with coverage, and we were like ‘okay this is what we need.’
Alex Ramirez
Senior Manager, Business Technology at PCL
Solar panel inspection using drones
PCL takes on solar projects that range in size, from small to massive. Once construction gets flowing on the larger fields, it happens in “waves,” with production teams driving more than a thousand piles a day, and module crews placing five times as many solar panels in that same time, Maland said. It’s exacting, breakneck-speed construction that offers a limited view from the ground, making drone data all the more valuable.
“In a large building or civil project, production tracking is important but it’s not as repetitive,” Ramirez said. “You can react in a week and maintain your schedule. With solar projects, if you are talking about how many thousand units are going up on a daily basis, and you let a few days slip, you may be in big trouble for the end of the job.”
For this reason, PCL needs reliable data capture every day, and they need a dependable workflow plus a processing engine that delivers orthomosaics to the superintendent every night.
“The superintendent starts his day at 5 am, opens his ortho and just starts navigating—zooming in and zooming out,” Ramirez said. “He’s checking where things are and whether what was planned for yesterday is done. He’s basically doing what other superintendents would do by walking, but he’s doing it on a big screen navigating the orthomosaic.”
So we fly as frequently as we can with the Wingtras, and then that data is pushed to our processing partner so that they can provide us with an update on the dashboard. I’ve flown WingtraOne about 8000 minutes (133 hours) so far.
Sean Maland
Surveyor and UAV Pilot at PCL
Upgrading from QX1 to RX1R II
The PCL team flies two GEN I WingtraOne drones. They started out with the 20 MP Sony QX1 payload (which has now been replaced by the 24 MP a6100 as the entry-level RGB option on the GEN II). After a successful start, they upgraded to the RX1R II. While both payloads deliver excellent and reliable results, Maland explains how those megapixels offer a new pair of glasses to view the world under study:
“At first when I saw the [RXIR II] orthos come back, I said ‘well I don’t know if it’s too much of a difference.’ But then we started flying all the time, and I was looking at those images. And then we flew the QX1 a bit again, and I could really see the difference.”
For more information and a comparison of outputs from Wingtra’s entry-level and advanced RGB options, visit this blog.
