DEME Looking Into Drones

DEME Group’s offshore wind division is examining the possibility of using drones to inspect the foundations of the offshore wind turbines for corrosion.

The Belgian company has teamed up with compatriot Airobot, a company specialising in creating collision avoidance, navigation and positioning technology to turn drones into flying robots, to select and evaluate the most suitable technology for the job.

Currently, the inspection of foundations is carried out manually by rope teams, and drones are seen as a good alternative.

”Airobot supports DEME to select and evaluate the state-of-the-art unmanned technology,” said Jan Leyssens, Managing Director at Airobot.

“Together with DEME, the Xena-1 from Altigator has been selected to which we’ll add our own collision avoidance technology and centimetre accurate GNSS receivers from Septentrio.”

Airobot is also assisting DEME in integrating the drones into their operations and organizing the pilot training together with Fortio.