Exelon Innovation Expo: Drones Go Everywhere

Last year’s Exelon Innovation Expo was enormous with thousands of Exelon employees and hundreds of employee teams competing for the innovation awards.  But this year’s, that took place at the D.C. Convention last Thursday, broke the record.  Four thousand Exelon employees and guests including three of us from Public Utilities Fortnightly spent the day peering into the future.  Let me take that back.  Those four thousand spent the day inventing the future.

Check out this cool brief video:

Exelon Innovation Expo Exhibitor: Hi there.  I'm from Exelon AeroLabs.  AeroLabs is a subsidiary of Exelon PowerLabs, Exelon's calibration and testing firm.

Exelon AeroLabs aims to serve the utilities by providing reliability and testing inspections to make CAIDI, SAIDI and SAIFI figures at an optimum maximum.

We primarily serve cooperatives in rural areas.  So if you're looking at the amount of assets per mile in rural areas, there's a lot of space, and a lot of miles of lines to cover.  So we found that drones are particularly effective in making for a more efficient inspection.

PUF: Well, let's see, show me something.

Exelon Exhibitor: Okay, sure.  Here is the DJI Matrice 210.  This drone is outfitted with two cameras currently.

Right here, we have a camera with 30x optimal zoom.  We often use this camera for doing high altitude flights with vegetation encroachment.  This camera can zoom in very far.  So you can see bolts, cotter pins missing, issues with the lines.

Then on the other side, here, you have Flir XT, which is a thermal camera.  It's radiometric.  We often fly over the assets looking for heat anomalies, transformers that are having issues.

This here is the Flyability Elios.  It's Swiss-made.  Flyability and AeroLabs formed a partnership.  So not only are we able to be a reseller of this drone, we are able to perform maintenance on these drones.  We are the only facility in the world that can perform maintenance on this drone if it has been radioactively contaminated.

You can step over here, so you can see.  What makes this drone unique is that it is covered in a cage that makes it collision-tolerant.  So it can bump into walls.  It can roll on the floor.  Its main use is for flying in confined spaces or areas that are inaccessible.

This counterweight, which helps center the cage, keep it in the same position, can be swapped for a TLD or other dosimetry equipment.  We have been flying in high radiation areas and minimizing dose experienced by rad workers.

It has a dual payload.  You have a thermal camera.  And an HD camera as well that's 1080.