Cognitive Drone Preventive Maintenance

Use Case: Aerial Predictive Maintenance for utility infrastructures

NRG-5 will use semi-autonomous swarms of drones and parallel survey from different views/cameras.The UAVs/Drones swarms need to run complex, bandwidth demanding, computationally heavy and time critical applications, meeting a) operational requirements, such as to define the flight plan for each drone in a swarm, so that they have optimal coverage with minimal resources, taking into account the flight capability of each UAV/drone and the remaining energy, b) communication requirements, either by cellular or satellite links controlling the drones flight and uploading captured video and c) mission requirements, such as object (i.e. lines, pipes, tanks, blades, towers) video analysis and inspection.

An energy infrastructure Predictive Maintenance as a Service (PMaaS) application will be implemented by integrating application specific logic with a complex forwarding graph of VNFs, such as:

• A virtual Media Processing & Analysis (vMPA) VNF able to perform real time video streams processing and analysis. Though this VFV will be specialized for energy infrastructures-related video processing, it will be generic enough to be used for generic video processing and analysis, complementing existing VNFs such CISCO’s Virtualized Video Processing VNF16.
• A virtual Drones Flight Control (vDFC) VNF able to perform real time autonomous control of drones. This VNF will also be quite generic, as it may be used for applications such as precision agriculture, security monitoring of critical infrastructures and crown management.

Cognitive Drone Preventive Maintenance

Smart Cities

The ultimate project goal of NRG5 project is to render the deployment, operation and management of existing and new communications and energy infrastructures (in the context of the Smart Energy-as-a-Service)easier, safer, more secure and resilient from an operational and financial point of view.