Recently, State Grid Suzhou Power Supply Company launched an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) multi nest remote takeoff and landing autonomous inspection system. This system can achieve precise takeoff and landing and charging/swapping of drones between multiple nests, greatly improving the comprehensive utilization rate of drones.

The system breaks the previous one-to-one binding relationship between drones and nests. Through multi nest networking technology, remote takeoff and landing technology, and visual positioning technology, multiple nests are connected into a network to achieve precise takeoff, landing, and charging/swapping of drones between each nest.

"During the operation process, the drone can choose the nearest nest to dock and supply according to the task requirements, without the need to return to the original takeoff point. It can support the drone to continue flight operations in long-distance and large-scale scenarios, " said Lu Yangwen, the person in charge of the drone business application project at State Grid Suzhou Power Supply Company. In this way, the original single point and single line inspection method has been transformed into a "frog jumping" continuous inspection, and the inspection coverage radius can be increased by 30%.

At present, State Grid Suzhou Power Supply Company has laid out three machine nests in Xiangcheng District High speed Railway New City, forming a network with a radius of 2.5 kilometers, covering seven 10 kV lines with a total length of 24 kilometers. In the future, State Grid Suzhou Power Supply Company will build more than 300 machine nests throughout the city.