Ulteig is a leading infrastructure engineering and consulting firm with a history spanning over 80 years. The company operates across what they call critical “Lifeline Sectors,” including Power, Renewables, Water, and Transportation. With a comprehensive ecosystem of software and services, Ulteig streamlines the complexities of managing large-scale infrastructure projects, ensuring efficiency and precision from planning through execution.
UIteig is a leading industry provider of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) for utility scale solar and battery energy storage systems (BESS) with over 45 gigawatts of experience. Building on their 20 plus years of SCADA experience, Ulteig sought to leverage new technologies to enhance services and operational procedures for clients. Today, they center innovation by exploring how machine learning can improve operations and services, from integrating computer vision into field equipment to streamlining internal processes.
For example, one project involved using computer vision to measure irradiance – or intensity of sunlight – in solar panel fields. Traditional methods rely on expensive, specialized devices that are cost-prohibitive to deploy widely, making it difficult to gather granular, real-time data across large solar sites. The Ulteig software engineering team developed an innovative computer vision model to monitor cloud coverage and infer irradiance levels.
"There’s big potential for machine learning, and specifically vision AI, to transform how infrastructure is designed and managed. If we can more effectively monitor and predict cloud cover over solar fields, it would be crucial for optimizing battery storage and other operations,” said Jeff Steinhaus, Associate Director of Software Engineering. “Beyond field applications, vision AI can also assist with mundane, repetitive tasks, freeing our engineers to focus on more critical work and deliver better outcomes to our clients.”
To develop and deploy their vision AI solutions, Ulteig decided to use Roboflow. Roboflow's platform provides an end-to-end solution for managing datasets, training models, and then testing and deploying them.
Roboflow's role-based annotation tools made it possible to divide labeling tasks among several team members. That way, engineers and subject matter experts could contribute to labeling sample images, leveraging their technical expertise and experience to create highly accurate datasets. Additionally, by leveraging Roboflow's cloud model training, Ulteig avoided the need to invest in expensive GPUs and other hardware, making the development process more cost-effective.
Ulteig also employed Roboflow's Workflows feature to combine models and automate post-processing steps. This allowed them to design multi-step logic chains that ingest images, analyze them using several different vision models depending on the task, and then automatically perform actions like cropping specific parts of the images before executing additional steps.
Another technique Ulteig leveraged was Active Learning, which helped them efficiently collect more sample images for their model training sets. This enabled them to automatically identify and collect examples of niche detections, which are then added to the dataset to further improve model accuracy. "When the training dataset lacks examples of objects appearing in different regions of the image, active learning helps us target those specific cases and add them to our training set, improving our model's robustness," noted Bob Loncar, Principal Solution Architect with the Software Engineering Team.
By developing and deploying these solutions, Ulteig illustrates the potential impact of vision AI on managing critical infrastructure projects, whether it’s predicting energy production in solar panel fields or assisting engineers during the design and review phase. Ulteig emphasized: Roboflow enabled us to develop innovative vision solutions to assist engineers, as they deliver higher quality service when working on massive, critical energy and utilities projects."
Ulteig is a purpose-driven consulting engineering leader committed to creating and solving for a sustainable future. Ulteig's employee-owners are technical experts who are transforming our world's critical infrastructure through collaborative and innovative solutions across the Lifeline Sectors® of Power, Renewables, Transportation and Water. Leveraging its expertise for more than 80 years, Ulteig operates throughout North America and serves a wide range of public and private clients.
