Private 5G Drone Monitoring: 5G Use Cases

Private 5G-powered drone monitoring

The challenge

Increasing employee safety in dangerous work environments

Working on a mine or offshore windfarm can expose employees to dangerous environments. Safety inspectors must regularly travel to remote locations to perform routine checks.

Costly maintenance and surveillance activities must be performed regularly to avoid leaks, outages and unexpected downtime.

Europe has a total installed offshore wind capacity of 25 GW, which corresponds to 5,402 grid-connected wind turbines across 12 countries.

Source: https://windeurope.org/
The EU Commission sees wind being half of Europe’s electricity by 2050, with wind energy capacity rising to up to 1,300 GW and a 25x increase in offshore wind in the EU.

Source: https://windeurope.org/about-wind/wind-energy-today/
In 2021, there were 780 reported offshore wind farm incidents and injuries that led to or potentially led to injury requiring first aid, medical treatment, restricted workdays or lost workdays.

Source: https://www.gplusoffshorewind.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/937282/G-2021-incident-data-report.pdf

Reduce costs and increase safety.

Drones could significantly reduce traditional
monitoring costs while also helping to increase
the safety of crews and civilians.

Private 5G opportunities

Help minimize risk with private 5G-powered drone monitoring.

The low latency of private 5G can enable drones to monitor dangerous and hard-to-reach locations in near real time.

Private 5G-powered drones could allow workers to remotely inspect sites with less safety risk.

5G has the bandwidth to stream video data from numerous drones.

Incorporating private 5G-powered drones into an infrastructure monitoring program could also reduce the hours and cost of in-person inspections.

How it works

- A drone’s first day on the job
- - From a control room, an engineer observes an autonomous drone conducting an inspection.
  - Because of private 5G’s low latency, the drone could provide live inspection video to the engineer. The engineer could also control the drone to make any specific observations needed.
- A drone’s first day on the job
- - During its inspection, the drone could use computer vision to recognize a potential problem or issue and send a notification to the engineer.
  - The engineer could then assess the situation via the live feed and take immediate action if necessary—preventing further damage and limiting the impact of any issue.
- A drone’s first day on the job
- - The drone could detect a problem in its early stages, allowing the facility to address it and continue to operate.
  - Preventing problems and predicting maintenance could save costs of repairs while also reducing environmental detriment.