Photovoltaic Plant Inspection by means of UAV: current practices and future perspectives

Recent trends show the importance of photovoltaic (PV) system inspection: in fact, it allows the increase in their performance and profitability. Moreover, it represents an important step for the safety and asset management of PV plants. Among all the possible inspection techniques, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has proven to be very effective in obtaining excellent results with a competitive cost: in particular, this type of inspection allows to drastically reduce inspection times with good quality of the results obtained. Finally, this inspection technique has been well combined with the development of image processing techniques capable of analyzing and processing the data acquired in the field quickly and reliably. The aim of this paper is to review the current practice in UAV-based PV plant inspection and to analyse future perspectives.