AMPERE

Access to electricity is a big challenge worldwide affecting 1.3 billion people. Nowadays, emerging countries are facing with a pre-existing infrastructure whose topology is not known and request new technologies to support them for maintenance and planning of new deployment. As a mid term horizon, it is planned to reduce this range to less than 1.0 billion people by 2030. In this context AMPERE consortium aims at providing an important contribution to decision-makers stakeholders, planning cost efficient maintenance and new affordable strategies in the Green Deal era

The original necessity for AMPERE product comes from issues related to operations performed by on-field workers to collect information about mapping and status of electrical assets. Indeed, the workers have to physically reach the area, not being sufficient the level of resolution of accuracy provided by global system (i.e. images from Earth Observation). In such a scenario, they have to operate in time-efficient and safe way by currently using hand-held cameras and tools to collect info to be processed offline.

AMPERE innovative approach solves this main problem, because workers are supported by RPA performing operations in a semi-automated way, i. e. exploiting sensors (optical/ thermal cameras and GNSS) to keep its trajectory as close as possible to electric assets – to capture a high-resolution detail – and at the same time being in respect to safe distance to avoid collisions.

AMPERE proposes a solution based on a GIS Cloud mapping technology, collecting on field data acquired with optical/thermal cameras and LIDAR installed on board a drone. In particular, a drone will be able to fly over selected areas performing semi-automated operations to collect optical and thermal images as well as 3D LiDAR-based reconstruction products. Such products are post processed at the central cloud GIS platform allowing operators in planning and monitoring activities by means of visualization and analytics tools can resolve data accessibility issues and improve the decision-making process.