Kuon Sugawara

In the past year outside of school, I interned as a programmer for Naruko Drone, a drone company which finds breaks in solar panels using infra-red cameras mounted on drones. Upon coming across Naruko Drone, my interests in their work motivated me to opportunistically reach out for some work experience, which I obtained. Upon starting my internship, the team would check each photo manually for bright spots on the infra-red images, which indicated lower temperatures equivalent to solar panel fractures. However, I realised that this process can be automated to increase efficiency and reduce my co-workers’ workload. Hence, I proposed and later developed a program using object identification to automatically detect such bright spots in the infra-red images. The program finds the difference in colour to highlight points that stood out. As an outcome, this not only improved quantity, by allowing my co-workers to focus on other projects but also helped reduce human errors, since it helped reduce false positives and negatives by finding the most minute details within the infra-red image. This internship showed how my programming skills helped improve lives and companies and set me on the path of further strengthening my capabilities to pursue something similar