Greg Nichols
for Robotics
| July 23, 2021 — 11:00 GMT (12:00 BST)
| Topic: Robotics
Kespry
Industrial drones are nothing new, but the growth curve and pace of adoption is pretty astounding. The adoption of industrial drone programs by industry is expected to increase at a 66.8% compound annual growth rate over the next year.
GN: Smart inspection is emerging as a key use case for drones and AI. What’s the current state of the market regarding smart inspection offerings?
Krishnan Hariharan: Companies are still in the business of performing manual inspections for assets across various industries including roof inspections for construction and roofing, or stockpile inspections in the mining, aggregate industry, and heavy earth moving for construction. 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, while keeping employees safe and keeping 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.
With this rapid adoption and because Smart Inspections can save organizations so much time and money while improving worker safety, they will soon be ubiquitous, and slow adopters or hold-outs will risk being outpaced by their competition.
Kespry’s solution extracts business insights from aerial data collection techniques by leveraging high resolution imagery and their real-space situational context or coordinates. And, we believe Kespry is the only organization capable of solving for multiple industries because of an extensible platform and the investments we’ve made to improve it over the years.
GN: Are smart inspection drones sector-agnostic, or will customization be required to leap from industries like pipeline inspection to crop inspection, for example?
Krishnan Hariharan: A drone is a very powerful medium to collect a lot of data efficiently that makes it possible for companies to process and analyze that information. Second, sensors used for drones continue to improve making it possible to use a single drone-payload for different kinds of missions across multiple industries. However, workflows for different industries are typically different and how the data is used and processed is nuanced for different industries. Therefore, if drones can accurately fly and gather the right information over the designated area, a robust software platform (including AI and data analytics) should be smart to be able to do the rest. The software will need to be flexible to adapt to each industry, gather the correct data and process the images correctly.
Kespry’s specialization and secret sauce is to efficiently automate the business workflow in an efficient and scalable fashion for multiple industries consistently. There will be some level of customization required for specific industries because of how the data is analyzed and processed. For example, asset classification for Oil Inspection is going to be a bit different than asset and inventory management for Mapping/Mining and Roofing. However, there’s also an opportunity to leverage many of the implementations across multiple industry verticals. For example, when Kespry performs defect and anomaly detection, our AI/ML models for cracks, water ponding, rust etc. can be easily reused and applied consistently.
GN: How is Kespry innovating the space and what’s coming down the line?
Krishnan Hariharan: Kespry is always staying on top of emerging technology to better serve its customers. Advancements in AI, ML and data analytics are allowing us to transmit data to our customers within minutes of it being collected so end-users can take action quickly. As a leader in the industry for years, Kespry takes key learning from evolving technology to further improve its platform, including the software, AI models, analytics and more, to adapt to any environment within the insurance/roofing, mining and aggregates, and industrial spaces. Currently we are working on expanding our compatibility with any drone model so that more customers can access our technology. Additionally, we are exploring the use of edge devices to process images faster so we can have high-resolution images to customers within moments. Finally, we are working towards expanding to offer smart inspections in the industrial space.
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Greg Nichols
for Robotics
| July 23, 2021 — 11:00 GMT (12:00 BST)
| Topic: Robotics