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Project Code [Ulysses/2021/32]
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Project title
Swarms of Drones for Intelligent Structural Health Monitoring of Wind Power Plants
Primary Funding Agency
Irish Research Council
Co-Funding Organisation(s)
Sustainable Energy Authority Ireland
Lead Organisation
University College Dublin (UCD)
Project Abstract
The introduction of autonomous, unmanned and remotely piloted aircraft systems (UAS/RPAS, aka systems on swarms of autonomous drones) into the civil airspace, in particular in low[1]level, densely populated urban areas, will allow operators to offer emerging services. The successful deployment of such services will strongly rely on the design and integration of novel techniques to manage highly mobile-edge resources. More importantly, these techniques should enable efficient task offloading on top of resource-constrained edge infrastructure in order to promptly and safely meet end-users requirements. One of the most promising emerging swarms of drones services is the intelligent structural monitoring of wind turbines (i.e., wind power plants), which have become one of the key pillars of the global renewable power supply. However, in contrast to solar power plants, wind power plants spread throughout wider areas and, sometimes on hazardous landscapes, such as offshore wind farms. For those reasons, the efficient monitoring of wind power plants is challenging. Swarms of drones rely on limited computing and communication capacities to accomplish safety-critical missions while generating real-time data streams that need to be scaled and processed in real-time with high throughput. Consequently, there is an increasing need to bring decentralised decision-making and distributed computing.
Research Theme
Air Science
Initial Projected Completion Date
31/12/2023