Engineering Commons^™

Toward The Use Of Drones For Photovoltaic Panel Inspection, Fausto Vega

Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters

The monitoring of photovoltaic panels is an essential task to maintain the efficiency of the power plant. The conventional form of inspection consists of manual inspection with a thermal camera which takes several days as fields contain thousands of panels. Solar panel installation is costly, and the installation does not guarantee maximum power generation without proper maintenance and handling. A drone with a thermal camera payload was developed to reduce labor costs as well as increase efficiency of the inspection as it can survey the field with a large field of view. Several image processing methods were used to process …