(WWJ) — New technology is saving Macomb County taxpayers thousands, if not millions of dollars.
Macomb County Public Works Commissioner Candice Miller on Monday announced her department recently started using drones and artificial intelligence to inspect sewers and storm drains, a move that will save a lot of money.
Speaking at an unveiling of the technology at the Chapaton Pump Station in St. Clair Shores, Miller said the combined “cutting-edge” tech inspection method of AI and drones will be a huge help for the department.
“If we learned anything from the terrible sinkhole infrastructure disaster that happened on 15 Mile Road a number of years ago, we learned the necessity for inspections – for inspecting all of our critical underground infrastructure and inspecting it on a regular basis as much as we can within the dollars that we have,” Miller said.
When the information from the drone inspection is uploaded into the county’s AI software, officials are able to determine the condition of infrastructure and allows them to “put together a capital improvement program” to make sure the infrastructure is properly maintained and does not fail, according to Miller.
Officials say the drone captures high-resolution video with improved lighting and it is “efficiently analyzed and scored” by a software program called SewerAI. In the past, video captured inside underground infrastructure had poor lighting and “took many hours by consultants to record and many hours to analyze.”
Miller says the county purchased the equipment for less than $100,000 and the county had previously been spending about $1 million every three years for inspections, which included a contractor collecting, analyzing and coding the data before reporting it to Public Works engineers.
Macomb County is the first in the state to use the new inspection method, but Miller predicts others will soon jump on board.
“We may be the first in the state to do this, but I will make a prediction that by the end of the year, others are gonna be following here. This is a new wave. This is how it’s going. This is how you can utilize technology for a common good,” Miller said.
To fly the drone in a sewer, an antenna is lowered to the bottom of a manhole, providing the signal it needs for the operator manning the hand-held controls above ground. It can be flown up to 1,000 feet and has been used in pipes with diameters ranging from 54 inches to 12 feet, according to the department.
The drone is “splashproof” and has sensors to keep it from getting too close to the wall but includes a cage for added protection if something goes wrong in tight spaces. Including the cage, it has a diameter of 16 inches.
In a separate inspection method used by Public Works staff, a GoPro camera is placed on a floating raft into the sewer, and the flow of wastewater carries the raft as the camera captures video of the pipe with 360-degree capability. The GoPro also is used within manhole structures, and the video is analyzed by the artificial intelligence program. A 3-D image is generated to allow measurements to be taken within that space.
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