so ive been doing tower inspections for about 3 years now, started with traditional climbing crews and we've slowly been transitioning more work to drone-based inspection. mostly using a Matrice 300 RTK with the Zenmuse H20T for the thermal + optical combo and honestly the time savings are real but there's still so much friction in the workflow that i'm not sure we're actually saving money yet

the main issue is the deliverables. clients want annotated reports with defect callouts and right now that's still pretty manual. we tried a couple of AI platforms for the auto-detection stuff but the false positive rate on rust and corrosion was way too high to trust without manual review anyway. so we're basically flying faster but spending the same time in post

anyone else doing tower work at scale and found a reporting pipeline that actually works? or are most of you still doing it all by hand in something like DroneDeploy or just raw LRF files

yeah the post-processing bottleneck is the real problem nobody talks about. everyone sells you on the flight efficiency and then you're sitting there for 4 hours clicking through images in some half-baked web app. we do a mix of monopoles and lattice towers and the lattice stuff is especially bad because you've got so many members to check and the auto-detection just falls apart when there's any kind of complex geometry in the background

we ended up building a semi-custom workflow in Agisoft for the 3D model side and then doing defect annotation manually in a pretty basic overlay system. not glamorous but the output is consistent and clients have stopped complaining about the reports. i think until the AI detection actually matures for this specific use case you're kind of stuck doing it the slow way

not doing towers but we do a lot of large antenna structures and comms equipment on rooftops and the H20T is overkill for most of that honestly. we dropped down to an M30T for the smaller stuff and its way easier to deal with logistically when you're hopping between sites. the thermal on it is good enough to catch what we need

the reporting thing is real though, our guy basically templated everything in powerpoint which sounds insane but the clients actually love it because it looks like what they were getting before from the climbing crews