ICL Services Develops Russia's First Automated Environmental Monitoring System Powered by Drone Sharing

At the heart of the solution is the DroneXpress platform, which integrates with various types of unmanned technologies and automates the entire inspection process: from flight planning and securing the required approvals to data processing, violation detection, and drafting administrative offense resolutions. The platform creates a trusted digital environment, ensuring transparency across all operations and the secure storage of geospatial data.

The platform was tested across four UAS application scenarios: identifying sites of unauthorized waste disposal, monitoring licensed subsoil use areas, inspecting water bodies for compliance with water protection zone regulations, and identifying blockages in riverbeds. "To reengineer its environmental monitoring processes, the client simply had to digitize its administrative regulations on the DroneXpress platform, define the inspection targets, and set the flight parameters. From there, our platform operated autonomously, detected violations with an accuracy of up to 5 centimeters, and generated draft documents for initiating administrative proceedings," says Valentina Kulagina, Head of the Product Office at ICL Services.

More than 44 sq km of territory were surveyed. Demonstration flights conducted in April and May of this year proved the effectiveness of the selected unmanned aircraft models. During the flights, the drones captured aerial photographs, and the resulting data (30,000 photos) was automatically processed on the DroneXpress platform using artificial intelligence technologies.

"Today, the value of projects like these is not defined by the use of drones alone. The platform creates a new kind of value for government customers. They are not buying hardware or simply paying for a drone to fly, nor are they buying fragments of imagery. They are buying a ready-to-use, verified result from the monitoring, oversight, or inspection process. This is exactly what the DroneXpress platform is designed for," notes Valentina Kulagina.

Based on the results of the pilot project, the use of DroneXpress confirmed that it is possible to expand the scope of environmental monitoring without increasing the number of inspectors, reduce data processing times, and virtually eliminate manual operations. The solution can be scaled to effectively carry out government functions in any sector of the economy where unmanned technologies and automated data processing are in demand.