Water utility operators are on the verge of a major inflection point that demands urgency and innovative approaches in how they fulfill their mission to deliver clean drinking water. To surmount the impending perfect storm of aging infrastructure, challenges to replacing a mature workforce, tightening departmental budgets, and ever-increasing environmental pressures, will necessitate some out-of-the-box approaches. In the midst of these compounding challenges, autonomous aerial drones paired with drone dock infrastructure offer one innovative path to streamlining operations and ensuring the department’s limited manpower is being best utilized. These once futuristic solutions are no longer theoretical; their impact and value have been demonstrated to be effective.
For decades, water utilities have relied on largely manual processes for infrastructure inspection, monitoring reservoirs and tributaries, assessing treatment and remediation needs, and even responding to emergencies. These traditional approaches are costly and time-consuming; they are also unsustainable. Autonomous aerial drones speed waterway and reservoir surveys, delivering a more comprehensive snapshot of utility infrastructure, and keeping staff from having to enter potentially dangerous or hard-to-reach terrain.
The deployment of regionwide drone dock infrastructure, paired with purpose-built drone payloads, is no longer a hypothetical. Across the urban and rural mountain region of Anji County outside Shanghai, the Anji Bureau of Water Resources has proven the effectiveness of such operations. An initial trial deployment saw the water utility erect eight elevated drone docks that automatically recharge survey drones as they conducted nonstop aerial patrols across 23 miles of contiguous waterways and reservoirs. The early trial was so successful that the Bureau expanded the dock network in a second phase to 15 drone docks, and another recent expansion now brings their drone services to the entire county of almost 1,000 square miles.
Leveraging a network that now includes 34 docks, commercial UAVs outfitted with daytime and nighttime infrared cameras traverse pre-planned patrol routes across the county. To complete a full survey of the Bureau’s water sources once took ground crews several days to visually inspect, with some hard-to-reach areas often left uninspected. With the innovative autonomous drones hopping between the network of drone docks to recharge during longer beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) surveys, the department now receives a full inspection in just a couple of hours.
Autonomous drones will not solve every challenge facing water utilities, but they have proven to be one of the most practical, scalable, and immediate opportunities to modernize operations and safeguard the systems we all depend on
While the drones and their dock infrastructure streamline the collection of high-resolution video, artificial intelligence plays a crucial role in making the system practical. As video streams back to the operations center, where a single operator manages the entire network and drone fleet, a comparative AI tool highlights changes since the last inspection mission and flags points of potential interest. The system provides department staff with reports of illegal dumping, unauthorized boating or swimming in the protected waterways, any unauthorized construction, noticeable erosion, and spots new algae blooms. Department staff can then align any necessary response to problem areas.
The automated aerial monitoring operation not only saves the department significant manpower but also limits emissions from the previously relied-upon vehicle fleet. Most importantly, though, the near-real-time picture of the entire system allows department staff to be far more responsive to maintenance issues than the episodic view of previous ground surveys or satellite imagery, which is only refreshed every few months.
So, how does a water utility facing tight budget constraints effectively roll out such a dynamic drone infrastructure? The drone docks that we’ve designed are unique relative to other drone-in-a-box systems in that they are designed to be sharable between multiple governmental departments conducting a variety of UAV services. With each dock able to perch up to four purpose-built drones simultaneously, the water department can share the base infrastructure with fire and rescue, public works, and more. This allows the hardware investment and operational costs to be spread across multiple departmental budgets. Additionally, as demonstrated with the Anji network, the dock infrastructure can start as a small proof-of-concept trial, so department managers can prove the ROI to elected officials and taxpayers.
This shared paradigm is the case on the municipal drone network in Anji County. In addition to the small fleet of autonomous survey drones conducting patrols and surveys for the water utility, county first-responders added a dedicated drone able to rapidly respond to search and rescue missions in the mountainous region, and public works drones cruise high above roadways to scan for potentially dangerous debris, vehicle incidents, and even identify damaged roadways.
Water is too critical, and the impending challenges too great to rely on outdated methods. Autonomous drones will not solve every challenge facing water utilities, but they have proven to be one of the most practical, scalable, and immediate opportunities to modernize operations and safeguard the systems we all depend on. The future of water management is not just underground, it’s in the air.
