Hammer Missions’ Post

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Thermal drone inspections. If you've been in the drone industry and you've looked around a little bit, you might have noticed that actually thermal drone inspections, especially thermal drawn roof inspections, have become increasingly popular. Now, what is that? Why do you even need thermal mapping, and is it so accessible that anyone can use it? We'll have a look at all of these questions in this video. Hey everyone, I'm barren from Hammer Missions and in this particular video what I wanna do is I wanna actually talk about roof inspections, but more importantly thermal roof inspections. Talk a little bit about why are these inspections becoming so common, how do you actually go about doing them? And then probably give you a little bit of a workflow at the end with respect to having thermal roof. Inspections as part of your portfolio, let's have a right so everything starts with a Y. So let's start with YR thermal drone roof inspections becoming important. Well, if you think about it, ultimately it all boils down to why use drones and why use thermal? So drones as we know for roof inspections, first of all they bring safety, you don't have to climb the roof anymore and they also brings data quality. You have a different level of experience when you get. Your client or customer to look at the roof virtually as opposed to having the inspection done by someone climbing there and taking a few random pictures. So I think the data quality and the safety aspects of roof inspections are forcing drones into this market. And that's great for everyone in the drone industry and also everyone not in the drone industry because ultimately everyone is able to benefit from the same technology. The second part of it is actually the thermal cameras, now thermal cameras, even though you might associate. With other types of applications, security applications, or applications where you're using them in surveillance. You can actually use them for building inspections. And as it happens some of the issues that happen for buildings can be actually very easily detected using thermal cameras. And one of the things that's actually made thermal drone roof inspections increasingly popular is the is the lowering cost of thermal cameras, especially radiometric thermal cameras. By radiometric I mean cameras that can actually take temperature measurements. All of those cameras have become increasingly. Accessible and they have become available on small platforms like the DJI Mavic 3 thermals. I think it's the two factors together, safety and then the lowering cost of the inspection. It has formed this amazing tailwind for drone roof inspections using thermal cameras to really take off. Now now that we've looked at why we are actually experiencing this uptake in thermal roof inspections, let's have a look at some of the use cases. So when it comes to use cases for thermal. Cameras, they're predominantly fall into two different buckets. One bucket is actually looking at heat related issues and the other bucket is basically looking at water related issues. Now how does that all work? Well, thermal cameras are very good at picking up temperature differences, so naturally any heat related issue, for example insulation issues in a building would be very easy to spot. Using a thermal camera you can figure out whether or not you've got the right. Some sort of insulation. You've got the right sort of air flow. You could actually figure out whether you've got leakages of air in parts of the building where you shouldn't. And actually all of that really contributes to better energy efficiency. And given where we are in the world today, both from an energy perspective and also from a sustainability perspective, it really matters to buildings whether or not they're energy efficient and whether or not they've got the right types of insulation. So like, one of the important things to bear in mind with heat related issues is that it all plays into a larger picture. Now on the other side of the spectrum, you've got things like water issues. Now how does that all work? And water, you would probably imagine that water is actually something that you would see visual. Well, as it so happens, water actually has a thermal signature that can be picked up using thermal cameras and essentially that water thermal signature can be made available in this data set that you could pick up on, right. So now that we understand what are the use cases for thermal data, let's try to understand. What are the common ways of using thermal data with thermal drone roof inspections? O one of the common things that we see is sort of overview mapping. So this is true for not just roofs but also for solar farms where you're trying to build an overview picture to understand what is the roof or what is the solar farm actually look like. And so you can do that really easily now. So you can use your common grid based flight planning to sort of fly over your roof or fly over your solar farm. And actually pick U all of the thermal related images and then stitch them together into a map or a model. And thermal data can be slightly harder to process than visual data, but it's not impossible. With the right flight planning and the right tools, you can actually get good results with thermal data as well. The other thing that we see most often is that once you've got that map or model, it is really important for you to be able to sort of clearly see the temperature differences for example. You might have a string issue during a solar park inspection and that will come up as an entire string of solar panels looking completely different versus some of the other solar panels on the solar park. You sort of see the same thing on the root side of things where if you have a water ingress issue or if you have a heat related issue, you could sort of see this variation in temperature or variation in colors in the thermal data which will show you where you've got perhaps a leakage. Or perhaps some form of issue forming. And some of these issues can actually signal a deeper structural issue when it comes to roof. So actually being able to see these temperatures are really, really important. Right. OK. So now that we've talked about what you can do with the thermal data, what are the deliverables actually look like O thermal deliverables are actually not too different from RGB deliverables with the key difference of temperature being involved. So essentially what you want to do is you want to create your maps or models to sort of show the overview of what the actual surface or solar park or area looks like and then you also want to be able to actually. Cherry pick certain areas where we'll actually provide the real temperature data on those particular areas, because it really helps understand how much hotter or cooler a certain area is. And so in the deliverable, you're not just providing an overview, you're also providing the temperature dates alongside. And having radiometric thermal cameras can be really helpful here because you can actually use that thermal. You can actually use the temperature data in these thermal cameras to be able to produce those results. Well, some of the other deliverables that we see are essentially creating ortho mosaics which can be exported in TIF formats. If you're not sure what that means, we made a whole video on the different drone data formats. So if you feel if you feel like figuring out how all of these will mats work, feel free to check out that video after this video. But one of the deliverables for sure is to do with author mosaics. The other deliverable we sometimes is actually around measurements because even with. Uh. Temperature dice involved. You want to be able to actually make those measurements, temperature measurements and allow the end customer or user to be able to sample different parts of your data sets and different times, right? So now that we understand what some of the use cases and deliverables look like and also understand why all of this is taking place in the 1st place, let's have a look at some of the best practices and how to get really high quality data using thermal cameras. So best practice #1 is. With your flight planning, you've got to make sure that you've got the right overlaps when you're capturing the data. As I mentioned before, processing thermal data can be slightly more challenging than visual data. You want to aim for a good contrasting balance between different features in this scene. The more features you have in this scene that contrast with each other and the more different parts of the scene look, the better than modern or the map will be in the end. So trying to optimize for that is really important, also capturing data. The right color palettes can have a big impact. So as opposed to capturing data in the grayscale color palettes, capturing data and the iron ball palettes can actually really help your results. So making sure you pick the right color palettes and have the right overlaps with your data to process is really important. The second best practice that we would recommend is to choose the right camera. Now the cameras that we normally see with the thermal sided things that are heavily used in the industry are very much drawn dependent. But we normally seen Flur cameras in this industry which have initially taken off. But from that point onwards, we've actually seen a huge advancement towards cameras like the Zenmuse H20, which is supported by the DGI M300. And we've also now seen a lot of proliferation of the DGI Mavic 3 thermal as affordable thermal camera drone that you can use with radiometric data. And the industry has actually come so far, it baffles me sometimes. Because when I started in the drawing industry, you had to buy your drone and thermal camera separately. And thermal camera used to cost a lot more than the drone. So the fact that he could actually buy it together as one package for a fraction of the price at what used to be five years ago, the handler tells you how fast the industry is moving and how bright the future is right? Back to thermal cameras. So another best practice that I would recommend is when you're doing your flight planning instead of flight planning with the thermal camera you actually. Want to fly plan perhaps if your flight planning for example with the Navex 3 thermal to plan with the wide camera instead and ensuring that your thermal camera is taking images alongside. The reason for that is that allows you to capture data in both your RGB or visual spectrum and then also in your thermal spectrum. And once you have both the datasets on file, you can actually process them side by side and sometimes you will find that you don't want to look at. Just the thermal data, you also want to have a look at the visual data and that's because if you're looking for something very specific on a roof or on a solar panel or any sort of structure that you're mapping thermally, you want to make sure that you can actually visually also see that structure. Because sometimes the issue surfaces in a particular place but actually originates somewhere completely different. So having context of your RGB data as you capture your thermal. Data is really, really important as well. Another best practice that I'll share with you when you're capturing data with the thermal camera is to make sure you're actually capturing data at the right time of the day. Now, this is often glossed over. So because you're actually capturing data, thermal data, you've got to make sure that actually the things you're capturing, the subjects you're capturing, they're not being influenced by a third party. And the third party in this case could actually be the sun. So to recapturing during the day, very sunny conditions, you'll find that actually instead of getting the innate temperature off a roof or any structure you're trying to thermally map, you're going to get the temperature that it's experiencing under a lot of sun. And so was she really want to do is you want to capture your data before the sun rises in the early morning or after the sunsets in the late evening and that will give you the real temperature. Of your particular subject, whether it's a roof, whether it's some structure and then help you really understand what is the image temperature. Especially if you're looking for things like water related issues. You would sort of find that actually you want the signature to be completely non influenced by things like the sun and you really want to be able to get to the root cause of the temperature difference. So having less interference from the sun is really important when it comes to capturing thermal data. Now there are other best practices that I can share. There with respect to the level data, but I would one one thing I would definitely recommend is that with the thermal data, if you're not certified as a thermographer, we would highly recommend either getting certified or working with the certified thermographer on your team. Because demography does involve a lot more complexity to it and as opposed to a simple visual inspection, you might require a bit more hands on deck, qualified hands on deck. To look at the data, look at the conditions of the site and then give you a more nuanced opinion on what might be going on with the articular structure. And the same holds true for if you're doing a visual inspection, but something more structural, you might want to get an architect or an engineer involved. So. Do make sure that you've got the right person on your team, the right stakeholders on your team who actually analyzing the data in the right way. However, all of this is still something that stems from collecting the right data, using the right drone and building well oiled workflows. So everything we've talked about in this video is still very relevant. You still have to build that standardization and then make the data available to the right stakeholders at the right time. So we went through quite a few things in this video. Hopefully that was interesting. They're just getting into thermal mapping. Please drop us a comment in the comments section below. What are you mapping? You're very excited to learn more and if you've done a particular thermal map or model, do share it with us. I think share it really helps everyone in this industry. We're really chuffed to see drones come along way and thermal cameras come a long way and I can't wait to see what it would look like in the next five years. If you like this video, give us a like and if you do enjoy watching our videos, give us a subscribe. We'll see you in the next video. As always, knowledge hub.