Unmanned aerial vehicle integrated real time kinematic in infrared inspection of photovoltaic panels
Isaac Segovia Ramírez, Jesús Rafael Parra Chaparro, Fausto Pedro Garcı́a Márquez
Abstract
Photovoltaic solar energy is a fast-growing renewable energy that needs reliable condition monitoring systems to ensure the productivity of solar plants. Unmanned aerial vehicles are widely implanted to reduce maintenance costs in photovoltaic plants, leading suitable information for fault detection and diagnosis. This paper presents a novel condition monitoring system for photovoltaic panels composed by a radiometric sensor embedded in an unmanned aerial vehicle. A new contribution based on the field of view analysis with infrared sensors is proposed according to the measurement conditions, and the increment of unmanned aerial vehicle positioning reliability by a real-time kinetic navigation system. Several scenarios are designed for testing the reliability and suitability of the system. The results show significant improvements of the proposed approach compared with the reference based on GPS navigation system, higher than 65% for 83% of the cases, minimizing the errors and increasing the accuracy of the inspection, avoiding the analysis of areas outside the panels. The application of real time kinematic ensures a suitable field of view definition in 97% of the cases, while inaccurate results are detected with GPS in more than 20% of the experiments.