Autonomous Wind-Turbine Blade Inspection Using LiDAR-Equipped Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

This research was supported by European Commission Horizon 2020 Programme through project under G. A. number 810321, named Twinning coordination action for spreading excellence in Aerial Robotics-AeRoTwin [1] and through project under G. A. number 820434, named ENergy aware BIM Cloud Platform in a COst-effective Building REnovation Context-ENCORE [2] ABSTRACT This paper presents a LiDAR-equipped unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) performing semiautonomous wind-turbine blade inspection which includes traversing to the blade tip and back, while keeping constant relative distance and heading to the blade plane. Plane detection is performed applying the RANSAC method on a subset of the gathered pointcloud. Utilizing the relative distance to the inferred plane as well as its normal vector, the UAV is able to maintain a constant distance and heading towards the plane while moving in parallel with it. The proposed procedure performs successful wind-turbine blade inspections with minimal operator involvement. Inspection results include high-resolution blade images as well as a 3D model of the wind-turbine structure. Finally, to show the feasibility of this approach, simulations are performed on a wind-turbine model and experimental results are presented for an outdoor single-blade inspection scenario both on a mock-up setup and a full-scale wind-turbine blade. It is worth noting that the system's adequacy has been fully validated in real conditions on an operational wind farm.

Performance Analysis of Fully Actuated Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Configurations with Passively Tilted Rotors

“…Figure 5 shows thrust force and drag torque characteristics with respect to rotor angular velocity. As can be seen from the obtained curves, the thrust forces and drag torques are approximately proportional to the square of the rotors' angular velocities; thus validating Equations ( 6) and (7). This fulfills the prerequisites for conducting a configuration performance analysis and enables computer simulations of the multirotor UAV behavior.…”

“…The multirotor type of UAV can perform a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL), be stationary in the air, and perform movements at a moderate speed in a three-dimensional (3D) space. This makes this type of aircraft suitable for many specific applications, such as the inspection of wind turbine blades [7] or transmission lines [8]. From a control point of view, the multirotor type of UAV is an inherently unstable, nonlinear, and multivariable system.…”

Reconstruction of Lamb Wave Dispersion Curves in Different Objects Using Signals Measured at Two Different Distances

“…Using distances x 1 = 225 mm, x 2 = 237 mm (frequency range of 22-38 kHz, ∆x/λ = 0.3) and x 1 = 225 mm and x 2 = 231 mm (frequency range of 57-64 kHz, ∆x/λ = 0.3) of the A 0 mode, the two segments of the dispersion curves were reconstructed. The comparison of the results with 2D-FFT algorithm based on peaks of spectrum magnitude was performed, the mean relative error δ c ph = 1.3% for first reconstructed range (22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37)(38) and δ c ph = 0.3% for second range (57-64 kHz) was determined. The total mean relative error δ c ph = 0.8% was calculated.…”

“…However, with the increasing number of wind farms, the world is facing an ever-increasing number of turbine blades being ejected [31]. The main reasons for this are various defects that occur in the production of WTBs, and the service life can affect the development of damage under fatigue loads [32,33]. Therefore, it is highly important to use techniques that would identify defects and have the ability to assess their location and size during such WTB production [34].…”

MUSSOL: A Micro-Uas to Survey Ship Cargo hOLds

“…Because of their fast deployment times and convenient size, a number of recent works have considered the use of multirotor-based vehicles within the context of the inspection and monitoring of industrial facilities and assets, for data collection at remote or safetycompromised areas, difficult to reach by humans and ground vehicles, and with large areas to be covered as fast as possible. The aforementioned works consider, among others, power plant boilers and chimneys [4][5][6], dam walls and penstocks [7,8], bridges [9][10][11], power lines [12][13][14], wind turbines [15,16], mines and tunnels [17,18], petrochemical facilities [19,20], and large-tonnage vessels [21,22]. A survey on existing UAS for the inspection of varied infrastructures can be found in [23].…”