Program History

San Diego Gas & Electric has an ongoing commitment to provide safe and reliable energy to its customers, and the greater community they are a part of. Part of this commitment has meant proactively addressing fire risk by “hardening” critical infrastructure within service areas that are most at risk for wildfires. This initiate has been coined “FiRM” (or Fire and Risk Mitigation.) The FiRM team is tasked with replacing older overhead distribution line elements using advanced technology and improving the overall health of the distribution system to adequately handle known weather conditions.

FiRM is an ongoing project, with an anticipated completion date near the end of 2021. Each year, between 3,000 and 5,000 wood poles and various other components are replaced with steel poles to mitigate fire risk. Many of these poles are located east of San Diego in rural East Country, where fire risk is high.

FiRM is subdivided into two major efforts.

The design/build team is a combination of engineers, designers, survey, and construction crews that focuses on the replacement of wood poles to steel. This team is dedicated to everything from scoping, to initial site survey, design, and final construction.

Post construction, another team comprised of surveyors, forensics engineers, and construction managers gather LiDAR data of the constructed lines and compares it to the original BAK files, work orders, and red lines. This team is tasked with ensuring proper clearances, loading, and GIS upgrades for the entirety of the program.

Introduction

Flight Evolved was brought on to the FiRM program in late 2016 to begin the As-Built surveying efforts. The initial scope of work was to map out approximately 3,200 Distribution poles that had been constructed since the program began. The purpose was to conduct LiDAR and Oblique Imagery capture missions to gather the necessary data for a forensics analysis and QA/QC by a third-party engineering firm.

The scope of work for this particular aspect of the FiRM program continues to grow as construction crews complete work orders into 2021. An additional 2,200 poles have been added to the As-Built effort in the past three months to compensate for additional completed construction since Flight Evolved joined the team.

In addition to the As-Built surveying effort, starting in Quarter 1 of 2017, Flight Evolved worked with the FiRM team to provide Design-Build data acquisition for the construction processes taking place in 2017 and 2018. This scope of work encompassed providing accurate LiDAR, Orthoimagery, and Oblique photography of approximately 3,500 additional scoped poles. Flight Evolved completed data acquisition and processing in approximately 2 months.

Methodology

To aid in large area data capture, Flight Evolved chose equipment best suited for flight time and high speed scanning. For a UAV, Flight Evolved operates a Pulse Aerospace Vapor 55. For LiDAR, the Riegl VUX-1 LR, integrated by Phoenix LiDAR was the tool of choice.

The Pulse Aerospace Vapor 55 is a long endurance, heavy lift UAV that offers low vibration and redundant autonomous flight. The Vapor is built to military spec, and has a long history of R&D for military and border patrol operations. It has a proven flight controller, long range data links, and redundancy across all components of the aircraft.

Pulse Aerospace Vapor 55 UAV

The VUX-1 LR offers long range scanning, so operating at safe altitudes of 350 feet AGL are well within the scanner’s operating range. Operating from these higher altitudes is safer, and provides a larger swath for LiDAR data.

Riegl VUX-1 LR LiDAR Scanner

Acquisition

Flight Evolved acquisition staff includes personnel previously trained in commercial aviation. This includes helicopter and fixed wing pilots. This is to maintain high levels of safety and decision making that are instilled through commercial training. Safety is never comprised in any mission.

Mission success is built off effective communication, both in the field and before. All missions are pre-programmed, and confirmed for safety in the field. The software for LiDAR acquisition features live point cloud processing, which aids in QA/QC efforts. In the field, we have confidence numbers for survey, trajectory, and laser data. These QA measures makes sure we get the right data every time, which limits re-mobilization.

Live Point Cloud Acquisition

Processing

With large amounts of acquisition comes even larger amounts of data processing. Flight Evolved has strict organization for the security and implementation of all data from acquisition through final delivery. Data has to move through multiple stages of processing. This goes from raw laser data, to delivering to our Engineering partners. Once a particular dataset has been completed by our staff, it moves to a 3rd party survey QA/QC for data truthing.

Small Distribution Sample Buffered to 50ft from Centerline

Conclusion

For pre-construction, Flight Evolved was successful in delivering hundreds of miles of fully processed LiDAR, directly importable for our Engineering partners. Post-construction LiDAR efforts are still on-going.