FPGA-Based Optical Surface Inspection of Wind Turbine Rotor Blades Using Quantized Neural Networks

Abstract

Quantization of the weights and activations of a neural network is a way to drastically reduce necessary memory accesses and to replace arithmetic operations with bit-wise operations. This is especially beneficial for the implementation on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology that is particularly suitable for embedded systems due to its low power consumption. In this paper, we propose an in-situ defect detection system utilizing a quantized neural network implemented on an FPGA for an automated surface inspection of wind turbine rotor blades using unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs). Contrary to the usual approach of offline defect detection, our approach prevents major downtimes and hence expenses. To our best knowledge, our work is among the first to transfer neural networks with weight and activation quantization into a tangible application. We achieve promising results with our network trained on our dataset consisting of 8024 good and defected rotor blade patches. Compared to a conventional network using floating-point arithmetic, we show that the classification accuracy we achieve is only slightly reduced by approximately 0.6%. With this work, we present a basic system for in-situ defect detection with versatile usability.

Development of Frequency Weighted Model Reduction Algorithm with Error Bound: Application to Doubly Fed Induction Generator Based Wind Turbines for Power System

“…Wind energy has reduced the sole reliance on fossil fuel means. During the last two decades, the rapid growth of wind power plants is observed all over the world [1][2][3][4]. According to the global wind energy council (GWEC), by the completion of the year 2019, the total cumulative installed capacity of wind energy was 60.4 GW [5] around the globe, which is a 19 % globally increase from installation in 2018 [6].…”

“…Continual change in speed, density, and temperature round the clock is the main issue with wind energy. Therefore the integration of the wind masts with the grid needs to be governed by certain policies, known as grid codes, to avoid the undesirable impact on the grid power [1,[7][8][9]. The developed grid codes are different for the different countries depending upon their environmental conditions and operational constraints [10,11].…”