Drones are being used to improve the quality of water in UK coastal waters and estuaries as part of a trial with Northumbrian Water, Makutu, RS Hydro and Skyports Drone Services.
Project Kingfisher, a world-first Drone or uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) monitoring trial for the water industry, has launched the next phase of the trial to explore how automatic and routine drone operations can support in the collection of data and water quality assessments in areas that might otherwise be inaccessible.
Following initial test flights in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, earlier this year, the next phase of Project Kingfisher expands the trials across the North East region of England to demonstrate how drone operations can enable water companies to proactively respond to issues, enhance worker safety and make it faster, cheaper and easier to gather water quality data in hard-to-reach areas.
Northumbrian Water currently relies on manual collection of water samples by staff, which can be challenging or simply not possible in hard-to-reach locations. In some cases, the travel to distant sites can take several hours, making the process time-consuming and inefficient.
Since initial flights at the beginning of 2024, Project Kingfisher partners have implemented several key learnings and changes to facilitate more robust operations.
Flights will be conducted by drone operator partner Skyports Drone Services, which will deploy an all-electric multirotor aircraft currently capable of travelling distances of up to 20km on a single charge. The UAV has been equipped with a variety of sensors, which are lowered into the sample points by a winch, where a number of water quality parameters are sampled in situ. The data is then provided in real time as a data feed to Northumbrian Water.
Project Kingfisher, which was given its name for the way the aircraft hover and dip in and out of water, has already seen strong results from trials. The partners hope that the trials will demonstrate the feasibility of using drones for supporting business operations and improving sustainability and water health.
John Edwards, Technical Policy Manager at Northumbrian Water said:
“Earlier in the year we carried out some initial testing, but the work we have conducted over the past month has been incredibly valuable for us and has helped us to understand the true benefits and opportunities this could unlock for the entire water industry in the future.
“We have been engaging with customers in the area here, and we know that water quality is an incredibly important topic at the moment – so it’s great that we are able to use these innovative trials to see how our regional coasts and rivers are monitored providing valuable data.
“This is an incredibly exciting project, and hopefully the success of these trials will enable us to carry out more on a larger scale in the future.”
James Sumsion, Chief Executive Officer of Makutu, added: “Finding innovative, low cost, environmentally sound and repeatable ways to obtain and analyse valuable water quality data is key to protecting and improving the environment in which we live. We are very pleased as to how these trials have progressed and look forward to significantly building out this capability within the next phase of the Programme.
Cheska Rojas, Project Kingfisher Lead at Skyports Drone Services, said: “Water quality monitoring is a really compelling drone inspection use case, which we’re excited to be developing through Project Kingfisher. The latest phase of trials build on learnings gathered earlier in the year and is an important step towards scaling these services and eventually rolling them out in other parts of the UK. The work we’re doing here aims to bring tangible improvements to UK water environments and the communities that use them.”
