Software I built for the drone inspection program at one of the largest refineries in North America — dashboards, thermal pipelines, and pre-flight tools, all in daily use by real crews.
Each airframe earns its place by reaching somewhere the others can't — 400 ft above a flare stack, sealed inside a storage tank, or docked on a rooftop running missions unattended.
The heavy-lift workhorse — long endurance and swappable payloads for site-wide mapping, structure inspection, and the missions that need the biggest sensors in the air the longest.
A compact quad carrying wide, telephoto, and radiometric thermal cameras in one gimbal — the everyday aircraft for thermal inspections and quick-turn captures. The 4TD is weatherized to live in the Dock.
A weatherproof drone-in-a-box that houses the M4TD and launches it on a schedule — recurring inspection routes flown unattended, with the aircraft returning to charge itself between missions.
A ducted FPV quad with full prop guards for flying close-quarters interiors and structures — first-person immersive control and 360° capture where a full-size aircraft won't fit.
The aircraft are delivery vehicles — the value is in the sensors, and reading what they return.
Garyville is a live refinery processing over half a million barrels a day. Every flight happens over active process units, around flammable product, and inside airspace and ground hazards that leave no room for improvisation. The margin for error is the whole job.
Maps ~96 process-unit polygons with sub-unit photo routing, a thermal viewer verified within 0.1°F of DJI's commercial reference tool, and self-contained single-file HTML snapshot publishing for vendor handoff. The system of record for how inspection flights get reviewed at the site.
One locked map of live aircraft, METAR weather, and animated NEXRAD radar around the refinery. The Rust backend classifies aircraft behavior, detects airspace conflicts by dead-reckoning, and predicts whether an aircraft will be audible on site — all shipped as a single 6 MB executable.
When DJI's official SDK failed across camera firmwares, I reverse-engineered DJI's proprietary APP3 thermal storage and FLIR's FFF binary container — re-encoding radiometric data via Planck-equation inversion, accurate to <0.01°C round-trip. Ships as one offline .exe used daily by the inspection team.
I plan and fly autonomous mapping missions that produce orthomosaics, 3D models, and LiDAR point clouds, then stitch them into a single georeferenced site basemap in ArcGIS Pro & Enterprise — the spatial backbone the refinery's digital-twin initiative runs on. RTK GNSS keeps everything survey-grade.
Compares monthly drone captures of pipe-support spring cans to detect lever movement, corrosion, and physical damage — then generates color-coded PDF reports. What used to be a manual, photo-by-photo review now runs as a pipeline.