Top Innovators
Ankush Agarwal, Vlad Anderson, and Po-Chen Chen represent the Automated Drone Initiative team at Exelon.
PUF's Lori Burkhart: Talk about your innovation that led to you and your team winning the Charles Steinmetz Top Innovator Award for Grid Operations, how it works, and what the benefits are to Exelon.
Ankush Agarwal: Thank you so much for this recognition. I was the director of advanced analytics at Exelon when our team developed this innovative solution. Po-Chen Chen managed our internal data science team, and Vlad Anderson, our principal quantitative engineer, led the project.
We collaborated with various teams including BGE Smart Grid & Innovation, BGE Drone Inspection, BGE Distribution Standards, BGE Regional Electric Operations, NVIDIA solution architects, 3D modelers and data scientists at Deloitte, with contributions from team members like David Barnard, Andrew McCauley, Reddy Mandati, Bishwa Sapkota, Pavel Dimitrov, Eren Aksu, and many more.
The problem we tackled was how to streamline and speed up the process of identifying defects in drone-captured images for proactive grid maintenance, enhancing reliability and resilience. Drones already offered faster and safer equipment inspections, but manually reviewing images and identifying defects took time. Our project automated this process.