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On this episode of Cell Tower News, host Joey Jackson talks with Nathan Schuett, CEO of Prenav, about the applications of precision drones in the tower industry and looks at how the company’s drone technology works.
In a presentation at TC3 Summit in San Jose, Calif., Schuett gave us a first look at his Prenav’s prototype, which has eight motors and a high resolution camera.
“What we do with this is we fly the drone all around the tower, actually in close proximity to the tower to capture imagery of the antennas, nuts, bolts. labels on the back of antennas, height above ground, azimuth tilt, all of the components that are needed for a pre-construction or post-contraction audit for tower mapping,” he said explaining how the drone works.
Schuett says what makes his drones more precise than others is that is doesn’t rely on GPS.
“Flying in close proximity to something like a cell phone tower or a wind turbine or a smoke stack, these tall vertical structures is pretty challenging because GPS isn’t accurate enough to control the drone so what we’ve built is our own navigation system that consists of a laser scanning system that’s on the ground that’s tracking the drone,” he explained. “So what we have is a line of sight technology that will guide the drone in close proximity to your cell phone tower and what we’re able to do with this configuration is we use the laser scanner to build a 3D model of the environment before we fly.”
The drone captures photos from all angles of the tower. The photos are then uploaded to the cloud using Prenav’s image processing engine and assembled into an accurate 3D reconstruction for engineering firms, carriers and tower owners to see digitized versions of their assets.
Shuett says the goal is not to put climbers out of a job, but to give them another tool in their toolkit. He says the benefit of Prenav’s system is that navigation is all automated so you don’t have to be an RC pilot for hundreds or thousands of hours.
“We’re making the technology accessible to people who are already doing this work today,” he said.
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