Industrial Technology Research Institute

Technology Overview

To increase patrol efficiency for rural areas and hillsides, and reduce the workload of patrol personnel, ITRI has developed a high-efficiency hillside drone fleet smart patrolling system. The major features of this system include the development of drone ground stations, programmable automated patrol paths and frequencies, thermal imaging that can detect suspicious items and people, providing warning information to managers, and the ability to operate multiple drones for assignments, thus reducing the need for site visitation by personnel and improving work efficiency. Digital management of information enables the drone fleet’s regular inspection records to be comprehensively stored on the cloud, which makes management, tracking and use easy, thus ensuring more efficient patrolling of rural areas and hillsides. Regular and automated tracking of rural areas also makes management smarter and more efficient.

This system was introduced in cooperation with the Keelung City Government in 2019; an automated drone fleet was used to conduct patrols. Since 2020, regular automated patrols have been conducted to monitor important areas. The inspection results were converted to drawings and automatically overlaid to analyze changes to individual sites, effectively improving hillside management. In the future, patrol fleets will be established to conduct regular and irregular patrol flights; this has the effect of increasing patrolling frequency to locations that are difficult to reach and preventing illegal developments.