Made-in-Calgary robot designed to bolster bird safety at power lines

A made-in-Calgary solution from a group of ex-oilpatch workersto curb power line bird deaths has attractedinternational attention.

Patrick Arnell, CEO ofFulcrumAir, a local robotics and unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)solutions company,says his company has worked closely with AltaLinkover two years to develop LineFly, an automated method for installing bird flight diverters.

"The traditional method of installingbird flight diverters has been with a helicopter and a lineman or a bucket truck.There was risk associated with the old method," he said."The helicopters and the linemen were operatingvery close to the wire environment. This is an automated method for taking some risk out of the system."

WATCH | See the LineFly in action in the video above

Arnell said he and a lot of his team began their careers in the oil and gas industry, and following an industry downturn, Fulcrum Air was founded in 2016.

"Calgary is abundant with very talented engineers.The machines are entirely designedand engineered in Calgary by our teams from scratch.All the mechanical aspects and the softwareand the code we've written ourselves," he said.

Andthere has been interest in this product fromaround the world.

"With our thrust in 2021 being in the United States,we've opened our office in Denver, Colorado, and that will be the base for servicing our U.S. customers," he said.

"We've had some expressions of interestin South Africa, in Chile and in Argentina.We're just looking at new office space currentlyto double the size of the space that we have in southeast Calgary.We're very proud to have manufactured this piece of equipment.

Bird collisions with transmission line wires is primarily associated with bodies of water and waterfowl, according to AltaLink environmental advisor Nikki Heck.

She said these birdstendto have small wings andlarger bodies that make itdifficult for them to manoeuvre around the wires.

"So we install these markers on what's called the overhead shield wire, that's that upper most wire. Its purposeis to protect the system from lightning damage but it's also thinner diameter than the conductor wires we use, and so because of that it can oftenappear invisible to birds, especially in low light conditions." she said.

"These tags really just help act as a warning system so thatthey can see that wire better and avoid a collision, and so we wanted to find ways that we could automatethe installation of bird markers."

Arnell says LineFly, afully autonomous robot, is remotely controlled from support vehicles that are up to a kilometre and a half away.

"The unmanned coaxial mini-helicopter picks the LineFly up and places it on the overhead powertransmission wire and begins to advance, automatically placing the bird flight diverters at any predetermined distance," he said.

LineFly can install between 300 and 600 bird flight diverters per day.

"It's a really efficient way that we caninstall bird markers in areas that might haveotherwise been really difficult to get abucket truck in, like say over top of a water bodyor say like a steep coulee, where a helicopter isn't able to access," said Heck.

The diverters are generally installed in areas that are believed to be higher risk for birds, and Arnell says studies have shown them to be at least 50 per cent effective and upwardof 90 per cent effective in some situations.

"One way to think about this isif you save the birds, you keep the lights onbecause some of these interactionscan actually have reliability impacts," he said.