# AI-Powered Monitoring and Inspection for Italian Highways with Docked Drones

- Event: NestGen ’25
- Published: March 7, 2025
- Length: 35:22
- Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/SOHfeVv0OZ0/

> The transcript of a recorded NestGen session, for reading or for use with an AI tool. It comes from the video's
> captions; automatic captions can mishear names and terms.

## Transcript

**[0:20]** hello everyone and welcome to nesg 2025 my name is Neil and I'm from the FlytBase team and it's absolutely thrilling to have you here today today we're going to dive into a topic that is as exciting as it is gamechanging so as you can see on your screen AI powered monitoring and inspection for Italian highways with dog drones and today we are going to explore how AI view Group leverages doc and drone Hardware flight automation software data analytics and remote command and control systems to revolutionize the way highway inspections are done now let's take a quick pit pit stop and talk about uh our star of the show which is aiv group so the group is headquartered in Rome Italy and is a Pioneer in aial intelligence which specializes in unman technology uh operations that perfectly blend with safety and efficiency and their mission is simple to drive digital

**[1:26]** transformation in the autonomous drone Ops industry and simply put aiv group is a leader in setting high standards for how Enterprises can leverage aial intelligence for smarter and safer autonomous Ops before we jump in to the heart of today's session let's also take a moment to interact with our community so if you're digging what you're hearing on this session go ahead and you know drop a LinkedIn post please make sure that you tag FlytBase aiv View and use the hashtag nesg and you know your engagement fuels our community and helps us build the momentum and keep the momentum going and there's some inside scoop as well so the top three posts will score exclusive NJ hampers and trust me the hampers are really good so please make sure that you post post on LinkedIn in addition to this a few housekeeping rules for the audience so on the top right we have a Q&A corner where you can drop in all your questions as they come and we'll

**[2:29]** take them at the end of the session the session will also be a little interactive so keep an eye out for our mids session polls we want to hear your voice so get ready to cast your vote as well last but not the least a quick word of thanks for our sponsors who make events like nesg possible and a success so our Media Partners digital Spotlight and our broadcast sponsors all right without any further ado let's get right at it I am excited to learn more about AI View's approach to Highway inspections and with that let me take this moment to introduce you to our speaker for the day so audience it's my absolute pleasure to introduce you our speaker Nicola Marti the CEO of aiv group hi Nicola great to have you here I thanks for the invitation and I'm excited too to start this session and let understand how we build

**[3:33]** a big Pro in Italy on the highway with Ducket drones right I'll just give the audience a brief introduction about you as well so everyone Nicola has been a driving force in the unman technology space leading the charge in developing AI power tools that work hand inand with drone Solutions and under his leadership aiv gr group has not only enhanced operational eff efficiency but also refined safety standards for infrastructure monitoring especially on busy highways at as we'll just cover and on a personal note I've had the pleasure of working with niola for about 3 to four years and let me tell you that he's been one of our true early adopters of autonomous drone technology and operations and I've seen his unwavering commitment to advancing the Drone industry firsthand so his insights and Forward Thinking approach not only transform Highway inspections but also keep us all on our TOs and I'm really excited for you

**[4:36]** know hearing his insights and his vision with AIU growth so with that n Nicola I'm thrilled to hand over the mic to you the stage is all yours thank you very much Neil I will start with sharing my screen let me know if everything is okay yes we can see your screen okay uh you can see in full screen the presentation yes I can okay okay let's go start uh as Neil said we are have a group uh we are an Italian company started in 2012 uh today we are more than 30 employees plus professional that work we has and our goal is to help the big companies the Enterprise companies in in the adoption of

**[5:37]** a man Technologies in their operational maintenance uh processes this is what we do from from the beginning from for the best uh and most important companies in Italy from last two years ago we ented in the Hine group as part of the European um Regional European office and so we started also this adventure uh bringing our technology bringing our experience around the world we are mainly uh of course certified pilot and today we are also remote pilot I we will as we will see later in the presentation uh we have also technology expert we develop our platforms based on uh technology standard uh we are uh expert in artificial intelligence

**[6:40]** generative and so we help we help our customer in develop special Project based door on machine learning artificial intelligent projects and at the end we are also professional so we certifi all our result we Char the report based on the things that we do we have a 10 year experience and more in the transportation Market especially using drones of course we work as a state in the engineering and construction part in the operation in the maintenance and the inventory of the asset we have a big track record and number on inspection like Bridges Kon and PES and everything related to the asset INF structure of the highway and also in the railway uh from last year we started also big project on traffic monitoring

**[7:40]** and we uh performed more than 3,000 remote Mission uh for traffic monitoring inspection with docket drones uh our process and our framework of work is quite simple we uh perform operation in veloc v and remote with our thanks to our control center then we apply Intelligence on data that we capture and we certify the report that we provide to our customer uh as you can see in the slide we work on traffic monitoring that is the the today argument but also we perform Bridge inspection Road operation inspection inventory and surveys today I want to present our last born in our in our company uh our remote control center the name is ready means remote autonomous drone intelligence common and control

**[8:43]** center uh with this common and control center we operate remote and man operation of course we are integrated with the usace services with the with a UTM service provider in Italy that is the flight and we provide also advisoring and training for the company want to start to cooperate with our control center this is the workflow uh for our customers so we fly remote we hire remote pilot that fly for the customer uh providing uh Mission and and service then we organize all the data for analyzing uh the the critical information the business critical information for the customer and we let the customer ha so concentrate himself in the main part of their business so manage traffic or reduce incident or uh go to Emergency Services

**[9:49]** on the on on the Highland our control center manage different kind of docket Dres uh depending on the needs uh of the customer so we can work with a medium range uh classic M tree uh or empty TR 30 or long range long range MV Tool uh drones for long range flight of course uh with the Common Center with theof the Common Center we we plan and we work under our safety procedure uh in the operation and the missions and then with the artificial intelligence module we work on data uh extracting business information for the customer today we will talk about specific use case that is traffic monitoring more

**[10:49]** than traffic mon because at the end we started with a traffic monitor with the Italian highway but today we do a lot of things uh with the same with the same system so a system started for making only remote traffic monitoring today perform inspection the highway to they perform uh emergency services to they perform uh control of the road works the architecture is uh simple we we use of course five based uh platform for the command control of the of the Drone plus we had our uh other platform for managing data as I said through artificial intelligence and Reporting data uh our uh object are related to the uh traffic management uh Road operation support uh um emergency response and

**[11:55]** also for shaking uh some we hav that could be happened in in few time today we are on with our project on two uh main customer uh on the highway the first of all is is the is the biggest company in Italy that is outr Vitalia through their technology company named Moon with them we are uh since to here uh we are going with uh with the REM operation the highway uh we started with the five nested trone uh installed in the um Tollgate around the Tollgate of the of the highway or in the service area of the highway so people getting gas uh can see a drone flying and monitoring the highway the project is Falco if someone of you want to Google Falco Falco project we

**[12:58]** find a lot of newspaper and uh uh web TV talking about talking about it the main uh key point of the project is the increasing in detection event and decreasing of the intervention time for the people who work on the on the street or on on the road uh as you say Road monitoring uh is one of the service that we do uh real time monitoring uh in monitoring the road works and we work in day and night emergencies special Transportation everything Could Happen uh on a big network of Highway the second one is started a few months ago so uh another another company who manage uh a part of the highway in in Italy today we have two uh docks to Nest installed and we are moving on with more

**[14:04]** of them for covering a large a large part of the of the network with all the two open this year I think around 50 uh nested drone installation we start uh our our system architecture installing uh the specific for the customer so we start providing them uh all the analysis uh related to the um conops Sora and so on for letting them perform uh the the operation uh we choose the best uh drone and the best nest for them uh relating to the the need of the customer then with a flight management system we provide provide all the mission planning and activities for starting the operation uh into our Contra common control center R

**[15:10]** uh if we do not have the specific algorith we start to develop a capturing data for training and then we uh release uh the the algorithm the module for for the for for the customer uh at at at the end we integrate uh the uh common Control Center information into the traffic control room of the customer customer have they traffic control room in which they provide information with fit camera we had uh some video on the on their video wall with the information in real time uh of the Drone live streaming plus we will see later in a video all the information Rel related to the availability of the drones and nest and what they they are doing so a real understanding of the general system

**[16:12]** how is working uh which Nest are working in in in this moment what what Nest are under maintenance and so on talking about artificial intelligence we have some algorith Rel to the traffic monitoring so we can't analyze the the traffic in terms of statistical what with which car with how many trucks and and so on uh then we started to develop solution related to the RO work and the signal into the RO work just to let understand if the signal if everything is like they uh um program it uh before starting the road work so if everything is okay we calculate the trory of the the cars to see if the if there are no problem uh if everything is safe

**[17:13]** uh on the same time the Drone analyze the P the pment crack detection uh just to check if there are if need some uh some kind of requirement and so on we work on the demon uh mission on CO as we say it or Planet this means that we are 24hour in contact with the traffic control room of the customer we have a radio connection with them so uh we have a specific language uh to talk with them and we start our reparation when we heard that something is start to happen happen we know where it start to happen and we send the Drone there just to let them have a look in few minutes and take the decision how to proceed with u with their business process so uh on them ad Mission

**[18:18]** it's happened that car are not more passing because there is an accident in in a in a in a in a area not covered with with the fixer camera so the Drone is useable because can understand and have a a picture Al of what happening uh those are some of the que that normally we have in our in our especially in in the north area in which we have in this moment in place a lot of Road Woods we check not only the traffic but as state we check also the infrastructure so the Drone are used also for checking is in terms of asset in terms of infrastructure in terms of protection for the car for the against the incident are good or not so you can see in this case some shock

**[19:21]** absorber uh that are D it uh because a car crashed and no one rep it or some some some some damages so it's important for for the highway manager understand that there are some those kind of issues and with the Drone we are ready to report it in a very very fast way same for uh other kind of uh issue uh that the on the Ia can happen uh we supported them in different moment in which there were some emergency uh actions uh which drone they have a 30 minutes uh fix camera uh in there just to follow uh what is happening how the emergency car are moving on how the ambulances

**[20:24]** or um doctors everyone is moving for for solving uh the problem and that's another big result for the for the highway because they reduce the response time and reduce the the the the time in which the highway uh is is not performing that that's the um video uh we did with uh with the with them uh on the on the service that we provide oh sorry this looks so exciting niola I mean seeing it all in production from

**[21:29]** actual customer deployments I'm sure the audience has a lot to learn from you know all of your best practices so uh as you have seen in the in the video uh there is a nest uh security with uh with fences with the secur

**[22:32]** camera and so on then we have integrated all the workflow process into the customer system this is the the main part of the project because the tool the Drone has became part of the process and it's not a different things outside that can be called for a service one time two times no it's a tool that is present in the traffic control room of the customer and the the traffic control room people are really happy to have a support of something in the air can be launched when they need it or that can perform Planet flight during the day just to check that everything is okay this is the real part of the most important part of the project of course not giving them simple drone but as I said

**[23:36]** the beginning our goal is to uh let them introduce a Manet technology in their operation and this is what we did with this C this customer especially and of course other custom this is the most important part and I also agree with that Nicola so essentially you know a technology can only succeed if it becomes a part of your main workflows if it's totally separate from that there is always a barrier for people to you know use that technology so as long as it's it becomes a part of your customers workflows and integrates with that uh there's a lot of Roi then that end users can get out of this entire solution yes because uh you have to solve a problem a problem for the customer if you cut only technology you are not solving nothing at the hand you are creating another problem

**[24:39]** managing other technology so we are talking about um autonomous drone in the next future we will have a panel later talking about autonomous drone this is this is the four step of course autonomous means a lot things that needs to be developed in the in the in in the next time but today we are started to be autonomous because we are creating the first pillar uh of the information for doing that autonomous related to the infrastructure we we need to to put the Drone inside the customer infrastructure only in this way we we will win our our battle for for for for for the otherwise it's only it's only a service of flight something around around

**[25:44]** the I don't know if there are some question yes there are a few questions Nicola before we add to the questions first of all thank you for you know sharing all of these insights and inside which are actually coming from customer deployments U you know so these are the things that help us you know gauge where how the technology has penetrated the industry the ROI it is bringing the cost saving uh not to forget the you know lives that this solution is probably Saving right drones in the air on highways detecting uh accidents fires uh you know the these are the additional things which cannot be calculated because those things are Priceless but I'm sure the audience got a lot of insights I think the first question is uh from somebody from nikil uh who's from drone lab India and he wants to ask is

**[26:49]** how many kilometers can a drone cover uh with one dock at a given time so if you could share some of those insights it might be related to the kind of area that you're operating in the kind of signal penetration or attenuation you might have but from your experience what is the maximum distance that you have seen um in terms of uh flight distance from from the dock we are talking about really at the end maximum 3 kilometers on the left 3 kilm on right uh it could be uh low uh but uh uh the end is not so low because uh what the customer need what for traffic monitoring for uh analyzing what is happening uh the most important is is the field of you right so if you are 2 kilom away you can see in

**[27:49]** uh in some part 10 12 kilometer of Highway understanding everything is okay customer uh solve the problem to have a general idea of the behavior of the highway uh in with a with a A View From the sky so we we can uh sharply goes to the point in in a range of 3 kilomet left and 3 kilm right and that's enough because of course uh you have not to cover the full network uh the highway companies know perfectly where the uh incident happen statistically so they need to cover a special part or dangerous part of the of of the highway and they put there The Nest plus with the field of view they can see

**[28:49]** more all right so it's the field of view and strategically positioning the docking stations where you know you know there might be choke points or like some vital areas where you know a drone is always it's better to have a drone or a yes there are part of the highway where never happen from years and I I don't know if in the other country happen when you hear about traffic information you hear Allway the same part of the of the network area because it's it's a it's a famous problem on that and they could could put the the the the N drone there just to monitoring the every every moment what's happened right and now you know we also have ai so AI can also see the historical data where most of the accidents or you know other things have happened and then we can figure out those vital areas using AI as well so you can shorten the time to

**[29:54]** pick out those uh problems as well so one more question is uh did you face any challenges in setting up the remote command and control center so uh I think that because people would want to know what is how first of all you've set it up and then what is your vision for it as well because you mentioned that uh you know the customers are going to come to you and they're going to ask you to fly for them and they will not necessarily get the regulatory permissions so can you shed some light on that because we also seeing a lot of Trends uh in the same direction but you've done it so you probably have more insights to share yeah uh we started our Comm control center under special uh authorization from our national Authority we started two years ago I'm happy to share with you that today we close our Lu process

**[30:55]** so we we get the I don't know how many there are but we get one of the first I you see for remote operation without Observer on the ground so uh it's it's another good goal for our for our company because we are ready to serve our customer uh with semi-autonomous we are going to into the autonomous so we we remove the Observer on the ground so the the Drone is on the field alone we go there only for maintenance two or three days in a in a month just to checking everything is okay so the challenge was at the beginning uh they reg the the authority and we uh solved it with the L and second and second uh that is I think most important that than the I see I'm telling a big thing

**[31:59]** uh that is the the system at the hand one of the most issues that we uh solve it is to convince the customer that the system it's safe in terms of cyber uh because we are working with the critical infrastructure and you know that critical infrastructure in Europe are under the ni to uh regulation so means a lot of other rules that you have to apply so has been more simple to take the look security issue the at the end but has been two big goals for our for our company so to sum Summit up uh regulations are one of the key challenges and and

**[32:59]** to make sure the customer is Happy uh ensuring cyber security hygiene uh data privacy data residency is also one of the critical concerns and challenges yes yes yes I repe because we are talking with the critical infrastructure owner right understood well niola unfortunately we are up on time three to four minutes uh but I'm sure this session was really valuable to a lot of you know uh people out there in the audience of and congratulations on securing the looc another feather in ai's cap and uh I'm sure there's a long way to go but you've set a very strong foundation and for sharing your insights like real world examples from your customer deployments uh I'm sure this helps paint a picture for the audience uh on the use cases where drones and dogs can be used and

**[34:03]** especially for Highway inspections and you know monitoring how drones and do stations can be utilized so thanks for taking out the time and sharing all of this uh with us and any closing thoughts before we end the session uh just just uh uh saying thanks to T Bas and you NE for this opportunity of course it's always a a good event the next G yes yes and the audience might not know this but Nicola is at a panel for autonomous Ops and boss regulations as well so uh you know you can head to Nicola's second session where he's going to explain in more detail and we'll share the more like nitty-gritties on you know autonomous drone operations and regulations so please make sure that you attend that session and do not miss it so with that Nicola thank you so much and

**[35:06]** yeah yeah byebye