Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Photovoltaic Systems Monitoring Applications

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the world has seen a revolution in solar energy technology. Operation and maintenance of Photovoltaic (PV) systems is becoming very crucial and a high valuable activity to meet future energy efficiency requirements. Therefore, investigation on Photovoltaic (PV) system inspection must be developed to obtain appropriate and efficient methods. Current experimental research strives to find out possibility of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs) or Systems (UASs) in monitoring application of Photovoltaic modules. For this purpose, a light Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) was employed to cooperate in Photovoltaic (PV) modules inspection by thermal imaging and visual cameras onboard in SolarTech laboratory and a real PV plant in Italy. However, the main scientific innovation of this experimental study is to propose a novel concept and method to contribute UAVs application in Photovoltaic (PV) systems inspection. The preliminary results show that Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) cooperation in Photovoltaic (PV) systems monitoring was effective to detect degradation and defects on Photovoltaic (PV) modules and it is much more reliable, fast and cost effective in comparison with traditional methods.