Machine learning and 10x more efficient wind turbine drone inspections at AES

Aug 27, 2019 | Blog

In the world of technology, innovating a successful solution for one of your customers is the best story any business can tell. ClearObject has delivered solutions from machine learning to connecting components to IoT, to artificial intelligence, data analytics, predictive modeling, managed services and more.

In many cases, these solutions go beyond what our customers ever thought possible. The Vision Aerial Intelligence Platform for global power company AES is one such solution.

Read their story

AES generates and distributes electric power in 15 countries, and windfarms in various geographical locations help them do it as part of their renewable energy generation portfolio.

The Challenge: Automating visual aerial inspections

Operating all the wind turbines in a windfarm is no easy task. Nor is performing visual aerial inspections for maintenance. Even with drones taking visual images, the problem was that humans still had to review every image to identify equipment readiness and maintenance issues. Hundreds of thousands of images, tedious manual reviews — do the math.

The Solution: Vision Aerial Intelligence Platform

The platform is Google Cloud Platform (GCP). ClearObject instrumented a data processing pipeline within the GCP environment, and then developed a computer vision model to reduce the volume of inspection images to be reviewed using machine learning.

The Result

55% reduction in images requiring human review after the initial round of vision model training. As the model continues to learn and improve over time, the image reduction rate is expected to improve to 90%.

10x more efficient wind turbine inspections in the field

What AES had to say…

“Working with Google, we identified ClearObject to be our local GCP partner to help us architect and develop our platform using the latest thinking in cloud and serverless tools available from Google. ClearObject has been a great partner and worked to quickly develop this platform for us.”

Nicholas Osborn, Global Machine Learning PMO, The AES Corporation


When you understand that every customer is unique and consistently deliver what they ask for, the result can be a whole library of “success stories.”

See more of them on our Customer Success Stories web page, and then imagine the possibilities for your business.

#droneinspection #machinelearning #dataanalytics