Pipe and Power Line Patrolling

Transporting hazardous materials via assets such as pipelines, transmission lines, railroads and waterways requires periodic linear inspection of the assets themselves and diligent inspection of easements in which they are established. Because of the wide spatial distribution of these resources, obtaining a complete and timely assessment of corridor and its infrastructure condition presents challenges that are compounded by the need for repeated examination.

Today the use of digital photographs, video, and audio narration is an extremely valuable tool for documentation and communication. Helicopter patrol and video recording of the corridor inspection is now an industry norm. For example, by flying in aircraft along asset corridors managers obtain a clear view of the systems they maintain, making notes and records along the way. Unfortunately, this technique limits the inspection period to the time that the mission is being flown, requires an “expert” in the passenger seat, and only provides a conditional assessment to those who board the mission.

Corridor asset patrol a big small business. Simple budgeting reveals that even for short reaches of these utility corridors require significant dollar budgets for scheduled patrolling. Based on our conversations, we can assume several rules of thumb to understand per mile patrolling variable costs: a 50 mile per hour patrol speed, an average expense of $700 per hour for the operation of a helicopter, and an 85 percent effective time on patrol. The simple costing exercise for a small transmission or pipeline network of three hundred miles patrolled once a fortnight likely requires close to a half-million dollar annual budget when operational overhead is factored in. For larger networks of a thousand miles or more, aerial infrastructure patrol programs receive multi-million dollar budgets.

Video mission recording has emerged as an effective post-mission review tool because the recordings extend the time period in which visual assessment can be conducted and enable the cooperative review of asset conditions by a body of inspectors. Helicopter platforms enable “low and slow” flights, acquiring a continuous visual record of the corridor without motion blur. In addition, video recorders incorporate in-flight voice records from the cockpit intercom system adding informative audio commentary during review.

What is unfortunate at this time is that for all but a small fraction of these corridor patrols, the video remains recorded to VCR-tape. While this format is reliable and low cost it can only painfully be forced to recall detail. Given available but alternate method s of digital storage, tape-based systems are essentially dead to the corporate interest, lifeless data contained in hundreds of plastic cartridges, each individually dated, sitting neatly on walls of indexed shelves, done by rote, at significant cost to confirm diligence and of little use or residual value once the hand written flight notes are passed on and the tape cartridge placed on its shelf.

What has been missing has been affordable video logging technology permitting an economical shift to digital video, tied to inexpensive storage, and most importantly, an efficient index to recall this valuable content. By shifting to digital formats, video fully sheds its linear tape-based constraints to one of random access. And spatial indexing permits an immediate solution. To add spatial referencing to this audiovisual media, some aerial service providers overlay Global Positioning System (GPS) data with a text-captioning device on each video frame. While valuable as a watermark this method doe not solve a digital index requirement.

Patented methods integrated in to intellectual property developed over a decade license Red Hen Systems to spatially index or geo-code all emerging digital video recording standards. Spatial multimedia is the timely union of digital media including still photography, motion video, stereo pairs, panoramic imagery sets, immersive media constructs, audio, and other data with location and date-time information from the global positioning systems (GPS) and other location designs. This exciting, new technology delivers a powerful combination of digital video, audio annotation and heads-up spatial awareness through background maps within an interactive software viewer.

Spatial Multimedia is a new technology that combines computer based mapping with multimedia content. The result is a virtual representation of the real world that dramatically communicates “what’s where” right from the desktop. Spatial Multimedia enables people who manage distributed plant facilities or resources to make better ad-hoc decisions based on a visual analysis of real world conditions, without incurring the expense associated with multiple on-site visits. Because the mapped multimedia content is available over a network, everyone in an organization has simultaneous access to the rich store of information, encouraging collaboration and mutual reasoning.

In simple terms, geotagged media, is the union of digital media files with a precise universal time and the 3D location at which they were collected. Essentially spatial multimedia is: “Take a picture. Get the point.”

Together, Red Hen spatial multimedia “snap-it, map-it, share-it” innovations provide an intuitive, interactive, tactile inspection of assets and their positions in time and space by displaying motion video with a moving cursor over a digital map. This union of digital multimedia and spatial dexterity provides a solid foundation for geographically disperse asset management and timely decision support.

Technology disruption

Red Hen has discovered in-situ tape-based corridor patrol programs are ripe for a swap-out/swap-in, next generation digital video recorder. Once the shift to a digital recording method is accepted, Red Hen spatial media logging solutions uniquely complement that commitment to the technical change. And it is this spatial index that radically shifts the utility of the corridor visual inventory. Once spatialized as a set of indexed patrol pathways, the current and past conditions of the corridor landscape and its infrastructures can be shared and intuitively accessed in ad-hoc ways across the organization.

Digital cameras can now see more, sensing infrared heat, ultraviolet electrical discharge, and in the not so distant future process multispectral combinations of filtered bandwidths that in the case of remote sensing for pipeline patrolling identifies source-point hydrocarbon leakages. These multi-eyed, well-glassed lenses and high-resolution cameras have also acquired gyroscopic stabilization to allow detail point inspections even while moving. Importantly for Red Hen that while the digital recording is increasingly specialized is not yet spatialized. And it is the spatialization, the geotagging, and mapped presentation that directly demonstrate the superior intuitive qualities that magnify enterprise utility over simple reviews or movies of assets.

A quick survey of uses will suggest these spatial media productions can have significant direct and many indirect compensations. In example, having a visual and map indexed solution will allow remote experts and other corporate interests to: inspect for and evaluate infrastructure fatigue and displacement; direct and evaluate vegetation management treatments; enhance erosion detection and mitigation; enable ad-hoc inspections of current conditions with-in rights-of-way anywhere within the system; provide an ability to monitor change in designated areas of high consequence; and to add visual references to corridor neighbor management and property relationships related to the potentially thousands of miles of corridor shorelines.

The possibilities are endless for scenarios where geo-referenced images embedded in a digital map provide a click-and-inspect indexing of infrastructure. The addition of images to a location on a map and the ease of use in communicating and sharing information organization with others are the key values of Red Hen technology.