Unmanned drones deployed to inspect power lines in east China

Nearly 2,000 unmanned drones have been deployed in east China's Jiangsu Province for automatic transmission line inspections, according to State Grid Jiangsu Electric Power Co., Ltd. This was reported by The Xinhua News Agency.

With an average of 2.5 drones covering every 100 km of power lines, currently the economic powerhouse has all of its key transmission lines being inspected by the drones, the company said.

"Based on the holographic power grid statistics, the drones can fulfill functions such as automatic route planning and real-time monitoring", – said Wang Hongxing of the company, noting that "Jiangsu's holographic power grid has now included 32,000 km of transmission lines".

"The drones are equipped with centimeter-level high-precision positioning and millimeter-level image recognition capabilities, with efficiency about six times that of traditional manual inspection", – Wang added.

Jiangsu has completed automatic inspection of 250,000 transmission towers in the first half of this year, and the province is planning to carry out more drone inspections.