Standardized Shot Lists for Repeatable Inspections
UAS product lead at Valmont Industries on scaling drone autonomy in industrial inspection
This is how drone inspection turns from pilot craft into a repeatable field operation. In practice, a shot list tells the operator exactly which asset views to capture, and an angle guide tells them how close, how high, and from what direction to fly so the image is usable for review later. That matters because poor angles force reshoots, slow file cleanup, and make outside crews less reliable on routine inspection work.
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The workflow around these inspections is already checklist heavy. Flight planning uses airspace, weather, terrain, and site access checks up front, then post flight work often gets delayed by file naming and data cleanup. Standardized capture rules remove variation at the earliest step, which reduces errors that cascade through the rest of the job.
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The value is highest in recurring inspections, where teams revisit similar towers, poles, roofs, or industrial assets on quarterly, annual, or outage based schedules. Once the best views are codified, an internal crew or contractor can reproduce the same image set each time, making before and after comparison much faster and more trustworthy.
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It also explains why drones and contact robots fit different jobs. Aerial systems are best when the goal is broad visual, thermal, LiDAR, or model capture from consistent stand off positions. Crawling systems like Gecko win when the job requires physical sensor contact and dense subsurface readings rather than a standard visual photo sweep.
The next step is turning these human written shot guides into software defined missions. As autonomy improves, the winning inspection stack will not just fly a drone, it will encode the exact camera positions, naming rules, and defect checks for each asset type so repeat inspections run with less labor and more machine generated analysis.