People rely on utility poles every day for power and electricity. Maintaining the quality of these utility poles is a task of utmost importance, yet unfortunately can be arduous and tedious to perform consistently. New technology means we can send out drones to check up on these, so what if we could use an AI to autopilot these drones and visit the poles? Better yet, what if we could use data to accurately pinpoint which poles need maintenance, all without having to do the work ourselves? That's the goal we aimed to achieve with the Utility Pole Safety Evaluator. Our project runs a drone autopilot AI in a simulated environment and takes a combination of images and drone data to evaluate the safety of a given pole. All of this data is processed and displayed in real-time, using Google Maps to see where maintenance is needed.
tl;dr: A website that lets you upload images + metadata of utility poles and approximate how much each one is leaning in real time.
- Repo for the back-end API: https://github.com/Rocksrock18/Lean-Calculator
- Repo for the Drone AI: https://github.com/WildJae/Drone_autopilot
- Link to the Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UIGLWtnVoPXpvNfgnMyHhOTt6sUd8r9i00P4BUSiQlM/edit?usp=sharing
Upload the image of the pole and the corresponding metadata into the dropbox.
- Note: Metadata will need to have a specific format. Visit our back-end repository to see how this is formatted. If you don't have any, you can download some data that we have provided.
It'll take a few seconds to start loading in your results. As they come in, you should see markers start to come up on the map.
Markers will have one of 4 colors representing the status of each pole:
- Red: Lean factor > 10
- Orange: Lean factor > 5
- Yellow: Lean factor > 2.5
- Green: Lean factor < 2.5
We use the AEP API in our website, which uses HTTP requests. In order to enable these requests in your browser, you have to take the following steps:
- Navigate to Browser Settings > Site Settings > Additional content settings > Insecure content
- Under the "Allow" section, click "Add"
- Enter https://utilitypolesafetyevaluator.herokuapp.com/ in the box and confirm
- Jasen Lai
- Jaewook Lee
- Arnold Makarov
- Jacob Maxson