The adoption of industrial drone programs for businesses has risen dramatically over the past five years. It is predicted to continue that growth, increasing at a 66.8 percent compound annual growth rate over the next year. Industrial drones are being used in major industries like insurance, mining, aggregates, and industrials.
They involve cutting-edge technologies (AI, machine learning, and deep data analytics) to drastically reduce the time workers spend gathering and analyzing data. This, in turn, increases accuracy and positively impacts customer value. With drones being more accurate at data collection and their technology increasingly paired with advanced ML/AI algorithms, the benefits of Smart Inspections become applicable across multiple industries.
Key Takeaways
- The adoption of Smart Inspections has surged, projected to grow at a 66.8% CAGR due to their efficiency and accuracy.
- Smart Inspections leverage drone technology, AI, and cloud analytics for faster, safer, and more precise inspections across various industries.
- Key benefits of Smart Inspections include time savings, improved accuracy, enhanced safety, and increased profitability for businesses.
- Drones autonomously gather data, ensuring employee safety while providing accurate insights within minutes.
- Smart Inspections enable businesses to focus on production efficiency rather than simple data collection tasks.
All of these working together result in a growing field impacting industrial work. They are forever changing how these industries operate daily globally: Smart Inspections.
What is Smart Inspection?
If your business is still ‘in the business’ of performing manual inspections such as building roofs in insurance, or stockpile inspections in the mining and aggregate industry, luckily, there is a better and much more efficient method: Smart Inspections. With the use of drone technology, cloud-based analytics, and high-resolution imagery, industries such as mining and aggregates, insurance, and industrials can now experience completely touchless surveys and inspections in half the time. Meanwhile, employee safety is ensured. These inspections keep organizations compliant to their respective industry standards. The ultimate value proposition for customers using Smart Inspection is to increase revenues and lower operations and maintenance costs.
For example, with smart inspections, insurance pros no longer need to manually climb on roofs to inspect damage. Instead, they can lean on AI-powered drones to simply tap out a flight perimeter on a tablet. The drone can take off and fly autonomously via AI, capture aerial imagery, and send it to the cloud to be analyzed. Finally, it lands all on its own. Similarly, Smart Inspections empower teams to quickly identify and correct detected issues before costly repairs or disasters occur in a code-free environment. Teams can quickly locate assets based on geospatial context, historical information, and entity of interest.
If business owners want to stay in the running with competition, adopting a new, safer, and more efficient way of performing inspections is the best way to do it. With the combined use of AI, machine learning (ML), drone technology, and the cloud, Smart Inspections can make your workflow easier from first steps on the work site to final decision-making.
Why use Smart Inspections?
The proof is in the pudding. Why take hours or days on something that can take mere minutes? And why manually take measurements when doing so with a drone can yield 80 percent greater accuracy? Why risk worker safety on stockpiles and roofs when they can be safely on the ground, easily manning a drone from an iPad?
Put simply, smart inspections have four core benefits:
- Time: Drones fly autonomously over the perimeter you map out. They gather aerial imaging and intelligence and send it directly to the cloud. Within minutes, an inspection is complete, and all members of the team have access to data gathered.
- Accuracy: Because autonomous drones leverage AI and machine learning, they are always improving in how they collect and process data. Even as they capture images from above, they can account for the pitch and slope of a roof or stockpile. This ensures end-users can get accuracy within the 1-3 percent range.
- Safety: Workplace safety is greatly improved through the use of smart inspections because employees no longer have to climb dangerous stockpiles or roofs to manually collect data and information. As stated in Protex AI’s guide on AI for video surveillance, data collection becomes more seamless. The AI automatically records unsafe events that are detected and captured.
- Profitability: Because smart inspections increase inventory accuracy and save time, they also save money. Instead of focusing on data collection and inspections, employees now can focus on higher-level tasks. This makes it easier for business leaders to grow and scale their companies.
Final Thoughts
Smart Inspections are disrupting industries with advanced technology that increases profit, saves time, and improves safety, accuracy, and profitability. With Smart Inspections, businesses can stop focusing on minor tasks like data collection. They can start focusing on maximizing production efficiency, labor productivity, and reducing downtime and errors using a single, integrated, and secure data platform from field collection through detailed analytics.
