Autonomous quay inspections – digitalizing workflows

Drones work as a tool to digitalize manual workflows and optimize knowledge sharing for focused maintenance on larger industrial ports.

Our customer Port of Esbjerg has agreed to let us feature how they made use of our drone management system and we hope you will be inspired by this feature story about the Lorenz Technology intelligent drone solution providing added value with relevant and systematic data collected with the use of drones.

Digitalization of workflows and better safety conditions

Doing maintenance demands inspecting fenders and safety ladders. The maintenance inspections are often a routine task that is continuously performed at larger industrial ports.

Inspecting quays is a challenging task, keeping in mind the need for precautionary measures due to the fact that currents are strong and life-threatening with a potentially fatal outcome if one inspector falls in the water.

The equipment needed to perform maintenance inspections traditionally includes a boat, crane, cameras (smartphones), and a notepad for remembering the exact location of observed incidents. In addition, the number of personnel is often substantial to both operate the equipment and gather the needed documentation of occurring incidents.

Photos and incident descriptions are then manually shared with colleagues and externals by personal upload and documentation, sharing the incident is typically done by email or phone call with no joint archive of documentation. Gathering the documentation (footage/photos, location, and notes) in a uniform way and joining repairs can, therefore, be hard to manage and systemize.

With the Lorenz Technology drone software, the possibility of autonomous quay inspections has been introduced, tested, and implemented at Port Esbjerg. The previous manual workflows are digitalized with real-time streaming of the recordings done by drones automatically uploading the footage of maintenance inspections to Lorenz Hive, where the video can be watched, shared, and administrated for incident reports on e.g. broken fenders or safety ladders.

Drone management system

We provide ports with smart technology for digitalizing their workflows, collecting data, and working with them intelligently.

Performing autonomous quay inspections is possible, but also doing updated area maps for managing rental areas, billings, and checking for vacant space. Stay tuned to learn more about our intelligent drone solution and its features.