A Path Planning Method for UAV Inspection of Wind Turbines

Traditional wind turbine inspection mainly relies on manual inspection, which has the advantages of intuitive and reliable inspection feedback, but only the inspection task is easily affected by weather and natural environment, as make it difficult to be carried out occasionally. It is necessary to introduce the rapid development of UAV autonomous inspection technology for wind turbine inspection tasks. However, UAV autonomous inspection faces the modeling problem caused by the stop position of wind turbines, Additionally, the inspection route planning is based on the experience of operators. The above reasons make it difficult to guarantee the inspection efficiency. In order to solve these problems, an automatic route planning algorithm for wind turbines was proposed. First, the panoramic view of wind turbines was collected by UAV, and the blade tips were automatically identified and located based on vision. Then, the patrol route and relay route were automatically generated, and the safety was checked by collision detection algorithm. Finally, the patrol tests of wind turbines were carried out. The results show that this method can improve the level and efficiency of automatic inspection of wind turbines.