Innovative Automated Control System for PV Fields Inspection and Remote Control

Unmanned aerial vehicles are becoming a reliable and useful instrument in monitoring and diagnostic services in the energy field. Operation and maintenance is a crucial factor for photovoltaic (PV) plant inspection and control activities, which currently are quite hard to be performed due to manual and dispersive procedures. The automation of the monitoring techniques will become, in future, an essential task in this market, and unmanned aerial system technology can play a role in it. This paper proposes a novel, comprehensive, and innovative approach in order to automate the inspection and prognostic procedure by means of designing a control system in order to provide accurate information on operating conditions of PV plants. The system is able to perform PV systems' monitoring, diagnosis, defects and failures reconnaissance, and data processing and to propose remedial actions. In the current experimental research, only infrared radiation sensor imaging was examined to evaluate thermographic behavior of the PV modules and to build the related image processing algorithm. However, it is possible to easily extend such a procedure in order to manage a larger amount of data. First results of this work have proven that the proposed procedure is very promising being fast, cost effective, and adaptable to large PV plants, which can be controlled during their entire lifetime.