Critical infrastructure, like the 1,234 km of <100m long road bridges in the Trans-European Transport Network, must be inspected every 3 years. But inspections are expensive, ~€4.9k/bridge: amortised €550k CAPEX, and €37k OPEX/vehicle, plus salaries for inspection engineers, and €1,400 costs for closing the infrastructure during inspection. Drones reduce the total inspections 77% on average to €1.1k/ bridge: 98% reduction in CAPEX and 88% in OPEX, as well as 100% savings from inspecting the infrastructure without disrupting its normal operation. However, drone inspections require a large amount (<2,000) of high-resolution (<20MP) photos to be taken from different orientations, resulting in large project size (<30 GB of data). Therefore, data storage and analysis costs avg. €912/bridge are the key bottleneck. Automated AI-based systems, like Twinspect, can further reduce 65% of total inspection costs (92% cost savings compared to on-site direct inspection by engineers).
Twinspect is the first AI-based photogrammetry solution that enables engineers to navigate and inspect highly fluid (>60 fps) and photorealistic (<50 GPX texture level detail and <200M polygons mesh density) 3D models of the infrastructure directly. It is the first and only solution that can be used for large infrastructure (>100k photos/project), e.g. bridges, dams, oil & gas extraction platforms and refineries. Our minimum viable product (MVP) consists of client-based photorealistic fluid 3D model digital twin technology, with automated AI-based defect clustering, detection, and annotation, and is already available (100+ paid pilot projects) as a SaaS to infrastructure owners directly, or via inspection services providers, e.g. engineering or drone companies. During the project we aim to enable, for the first time, the overlap of two 3D models from consecutive inspections for seamless visual inspection and develop AI tools to flag new or growing defects.
Twinspect enables more accurate (100% defect detection), consistent (collaborative annotation and ranking), and fully documented inspections (clustered photos and annotations). It also provides a complete record and full audit trail for the first time. This is a key advantage of first to market, that is to gather high-quality historical data, that we will leverage to develop deterioration models and predictive analytics tools to enable advanced asset management.
