Cost-effective flight strategy for aerial thermography inspection of photovoltaic power plants

Thermography from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) offers efficient fault inspection in solar parks. This paper presents an optimized fault detection procedure, including a two-stage autonomous flight strategy. The first stage images the entire park quickly at low resolution, flying fast at high altitude to detect possible faults. In the second stage, the detections are imaged at higher resolution, by flying an optimized path at lower altitude, for fault classification. Based on actual data, including a park-scale survey, this strategy is shown to have potential for significant savings in operation time, on the order of 70% or more, at realistic fault densities.