Abstract: The wind energy industry is growing rapidly. In the U.S. alone, the wind industry invested more than $11 billion in new plants in 2017 and added more than 7,000 megawatts of new capacity, representing 25% of all electric capacity added. One of the biggest challenges to growth remains the high costs of constructing wind farms, as well as the ongoing operations and maintenance costs. We present a fully autonomous drone system for capturing inspection images and analyzing them for defects. In less than half an hour, the drone is able to perform an inspection where it used to take a crew of workers climbing ropes half a day to complete. We present some of the obstacles and solutions we found while designing the complete system.

Bio: Dr. Yan Ke is a co-founder and CTO of Clobotics, a computer vision company and drone data analytics company. He is responsible for the overall research and development of the company’s products. Previously, Dr. Ke was the Chief Software Development Officer of EHang, Inc., a technological innovation company specializing in R&D, manufacturing, and sales of intelligent aerial vehicles. Dr. Ke is an expert in computer vision, data mining, machine learning, and distributed systems. Previously, he spent eight years at Microsoft leading the Bing Entity Understanding Group, where he architected and developed the core algorithms for Bing’s Knowledge Pane, Question Answering System, Satori Knowledge Graph, and Web Index Selection.
Dr. Ke earned his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Ph.D. in Computer Science, all from Carnegie Mellon University. He has published in top international computer vision conferences such as IEEE CVPR, ICCV, and holds 8 US patents.

Host: Martial Hebert
Contact: Lynnetta Miller