Autonomous monitoring and analysis of PV systems by unmanned aerial vehicles, internet of things and big data analytics

This paper presents a novel monitoring system called Autonomous Monitoring and Analysis which aims to facilitate the procedures of data acquisition, pre-processing, post-processing in order to provide accurate and real-time information about the operational status and performance of PV systems. The main objective of this research is to integrate various monitoring systems and platforms to diagnose the failures as fast as possible and also predict the service life of PV systems. This system consists of four main parts namely, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based monitoring system, smart monitoring system, Internet of Thing (IoT) and Big Data Analytics (BDA) platforms. Preliminary results demonstrate this Autonomous Monitoring and Analysis system is able to detect the Line-Line faults in PV arrays with an accuracy of 97% and also predict the output power of PV systems with an accuracy of 88%.