Automated mission planning for aerial large‐scale power plant thermal inspection

Abstract

AbstractClose‐range aerial inspection of large‐scale industrial facilities such as power plants is complex. It is characterized by a few areas suitable for safe landing, many obstacles, complicated radio communication, and so forth. The paper presented a new offline approach for automated mission planning in such conditions. It is based on novel concepts of ‐shaped flight profile and safe altitude map. These concepts reduce the mission planning task to a multiple traveling salesmen problem on a two‐dimensional map, which is solved using rapidly exploring random tree and genetic algorithms. A computational fluid dynamics‐based local turbulence map concept was proposed to avoid turbulence zones during inspection flights. As an advantage, this map can be generated at least 6.8× faster than the known approaches. Our new multicopter flight time prediction model provides an error of less than 10% in most cases and significantly outperforms those implemented in commercial mission planning software. All the proposed solutions were verified during a 2400‐MW power plant inspection. Our algorithms managed to plan to visit all the inspection points in six routes, approximately 15 min long each. This mission set has a comparable overall duration but better safety and even battery usage compared with the routes planned by a qualified operator. Moreover, the designed aerial inspection system provides higher quality images than manually from the ground using a thermal camera with two times higher sensitivity and equipped with more advanced optics. To our knowledge, this research is the first to report the successful implementation of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle‐based power equipment diagnostics on a large‐scale thermal power plant.