Picture this: the power grid goes down in Austin one afternoon. But instead of a bunch of tweets and Facebook posts complaining about the outage, the problem is quickly fixed and the day is hardly disrupted at all.
What if a drone could help carry out those quick repairs and save the day -- or helps identify a potential problem before it causes an outage?
Thanks to Jeff Brooks and his team at Aerial Applications, Austin is the pilot location for the company’s most ambitious municipal project yet. Working with organizations including SmartCity Austin, Austin Energy, Verizon and Intel, the Aerial Applications team using drone technology to help proactively manage the city electric grid for Austin Energy.
“If a problem occurs with the grid, we want to help Austin Energy lessen the response time it takes to fix it,” Brooks said.
The pilot project is the latest achievement for the three-year-old company.
Brooks met his co-founder, Joe Sullivan, at grad school in Pepperdine, and both had studied policy. Brooks worked in veterans affairs and border security, and he also had worked with military drone technology. Sullivan reached out to him because he needed with drone-related legislation. Sensing a need for change, Brooks signed on immediately.
“I saw a gap with this technology,” he said. “My motivation to get in was the power of drone technology and what it was being used for. There was a real lack of understanding publicly with the technology, and there was a natural fit when I got into it.”
The transformational technology pairs a variety of big data with GIS functionality. The team got their first big test working with Comcast during Hurricane Matthew. Drones were deployed in Savannah, Georgia, to monitor for broken telephone lines, as well as flooded and blocked roads. The platform, complete with maps that modeled the information and dropped pins on specific locations, allowed Comcast to figure out where over one hundred down phone lines were during the hurricane. With the information provided, Aerial Applications said it was able to decrease the response time by 50 percent.
“A drone could be a play toy for a child, or a weapon of war,” said Brooks. “How can we bridge that gap?”
To that, Aerial Applications has focused on niche areas of drone technology, working with clients in telecom, disaster response and electric transmission.
With the Austin Energy project, Brooks hopes Aerial Applications can help change how citizens think about drone technology.
“We want them to think 'hey my power went out and it got put back on because there’s a drone in the air,'" he said. "Then, drone technology isn’t so scary.”
The past year has seen the team continue to build out an in-house photogrammetry suite, as well as an entirely new application.
“Originally, our software was transferring massive amounts of data,” Brooks said. “We were running two shifts with data collectors and processors- everyone was working 24 hours a day. This new toolkit allows for our 3D modeling to be the best in the industry.”
While the two other founders are in Philadelphia and Daytona Beach, Austin will be Aerial Applications' center of operations, Brooks said. The founding team recently hired a new marketer and a full stack architect, and they are in the process of looking for a bigger office space in Austin. Brooks said Aerial Applications is also looking for a GIS analyst and someone else for their photogrammetry suite, as well as new talent for the marketing team.
So what’s next for the team? Brooks says they are open to anything the software lends itself to.
“All of this drone technology is part of a massive shift as to how technology is available. Remote sensoring and drone monitoring can move an organization from reactive to proactive management,” Brooks says. “It might be invisible to a lot of people, but getting the right information at the right time could be game-changing.”
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story misstated Jeff Brooks' name. His name has been corrected throughout the story.
