PORTSMOUTH INTERNATIONAL PORT TRIALS AUTOMATED DRONES FOR SAFEGUARDING PORT INFRASTRUCTURE
Using Skyport’s automated drone solutions, Portsmouth International Port was able to gain critical insights into the health of its port assets significantly faster, safer and more sustainably than manual inspections.
Location: United Kingdom
Industry: Maritime Services
Drone used: DJI Dock 2
Partner: Consortiq
The challenge
Keeping critical port infrastructure in peak condition, whilst tracking causes of damage
Portsmouth International Port is the UK’s second largest cross channel port, receiving over 50,000 vessels a year. Traffic management, security and maintenance are key priorities for successful port operations, but managing all three concurrently provides challenges.
With much of the port’s infrastructure sitting in hard to access areas, there are logistical challenges that come with facilitating manual inspections. There are also safety hazards that come with conducting these inspections around continuous vessel traffic.
For the port, it is critical that damage and wear are identified as early as possible. This helps to track any causes of damage, and allows any issues to be rectified before they evolve into more serious problems.
The solution
Automated drone inspections for asset monitoring
Portsmouth International Port identified that drone operations could offer a strong opportunity in being able to quickly and safely access these hard to reach areas, whilst providing high quality, repeatable data.
Using the DJI Dock 2, a “drone-in-a-box” solution, Skyports was able to conduct daily automated drone surveys that captured aerial images of the port estate. Flying a pre-selected route, the drones continually monitored the port’s high usage berths for any damage by vessels, providing the opportunity to identify the causes of damage as it happened. The drones also surveyed hard to access onshore infrastructure such as building and warehouse roofs.
The result
More frequent high quality inspections, facilitating the earlier discovery of damage and wear
During the trial Skyports conducted an extensive automated inspection flight campaign, identifying a damaged section of berth frontage, alongside surveying pre-mapped areas and identifying additional areas for review. Armed with these insights, Portsmouth International Port could then formulate a maintenance plan for its assets, alongside identifying causes of damage and accordingly pursuing compensation.
The exploration of the hard-to-reach areas demonstrated the drones’ versatility, and the automated operations provided a much safer solution to manual inspections, which could also be deployed at much shorter notice and more frequently.
Off the success of the project, Skyports will be expanding its services to include drone flights flown Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS), enabled by Skyports’ newly obtained Atypical Airspace approval. This will unlock more range and versatility, providing Portsmouth International Port with even deeper insights, including emissions monitoring.
TESTIMONIAL
“There are many hard-to-reach places in ports. Inspecting these often requires specialist equipment (which incurs high costs), alongside additional safety and risk management, and closures or isolation of space or equipment. Maintenance inspections are therefore done at intervals, which means there’s potential for third party damage, wear and tear and fatigue to compound over time. This leads to damage that is financially unrecoverable, more significant, and which potentially requires greater repairs than if caught early.
Skyport’s automated drone inspections demonstrated that more regular inspections can improve our ability to recover costs from third party incidents, ensure that minor issues do not escalate and become more costly, also helping to reduce downtime of key equipment and areas at the port.
The unique elements of automated flight paths mean that data is repeatable, and operational costs are lower than manned, one off, inspections, which in turn supports good return on investment. This will be critical to long term adoption of drones in the port sector.
We’re excited to continue trials with Skyports and explore additional drone use cases under the CMDC 6 trials.”
Chris Hatter
Head of Compliance, Portsmouth International Port