Swedish industry is set to benefit from a new partnership between Nordic communications provider Telia and Ericsson’s internal accelerator, Ericsson ONE, to perform livestream industrial inspections via drones navigating Telia’s mobile network.
The companies have created the first video streaming service in Sweden for industrial drones operating in hard-to-reach places. The innovation is the latest development in the longstanding Ericsson-Telia strategic partnership.
Built with Ericsson ONE’s new drone mobility project, the Telia Drone Inspection Service enables companies to access difficult environments such as construction sites, railways, power grids, and tall buildings to streamline inspections and improve industrial workflows.
ADVANTAGES
The solution will navigate via Telia’s mobile network and is encrypted end-to-end between user and drone. These factors will allow real-time drone video captures to be shared securely with multiple people viewing on computers, mobile phones, or tablets simultaneously. Personnel such as site investigators, technicians and industrial experts will be able to follow live video feeds to troubleshoot problems and monitor situations closely, improving quality assurance, reducing response times, and lowering costs.
Jan Pettersson, Head of Business Design, Telia, says: “Our new drone service, developed with Ericsson ONE to improve industrial operations in a range of challenging environments, will add new value to companies in a way that is not only cost-effective and faster to deploy but also safer, simpler, and more environmentally friendly.”
Radio-controlled drones currently used for industrial inspection within line-of-sight can be easily adapted to the mobile solution via a hand controller connected to an LTE router. With a downloadable application, users can get started quickly without the need for additional hardware.
JANUARY KICKSTART
Fredrik Flyrin, Innovation Program Manager and Ericsson ONE Intrapreneur, Ericsson, says: “Drones will continue to play a large role in society. We are working towards a future where drones can safely fly beyond visual line of sight, which will help companies streamline their operations and keep their staff safe. This new video streaming service for drones is an important step towards that future and towards faster and better decision-making.”
Ericsson ONE and Telia will kickstart a development program at the end of January in partnership with a number of companies, experimenting with various drone streaming applications and regularly evaluating the service to prepare drones for future 5G use cases. The customer program starts on January 29 with initial customers Vattenfall, E-on, Peab, Veidekke and the Vinnova project Edit 3.0.
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