Wind Turbine Farm Inspection Robot

Project number: 
21056
Sponsor: 
Tucson Electric Power
Academic year: 
2020-2021
Project Goal: Design and build a rover prototype that can autonomously navigate a wind farm to collect and extract data from wind turbine footage.

Wind farms are often situated in remote locations with turbines spread across a large land area. As the world shifts to renewable energy, demand for autonomous surveyor robots will grow to help monitor and improve efficiency of wind farms.

This rover, based on an electric all-terrain vehicle, includes a gimbal-mounted camera to record wind turbines, weather instrumentation to measure wind speed and direction, a GPS module attached to a Raspberry Pi 4 to generate a rover navigation, and a TFMini Plus LiDAR module for obstacle avoidance. The rover is powered by two 12V 50Ah lithium batteries, a monocrystalline 120-Watt solar panel and a solar charge controller. This equipment was assembled and integrated onto the ATV frame with software that allows the rover to traverse along a navigational way-point path to collect turbine video and weather conditions autonomously.

An external software package was created to process the collected footage to determine the rotational speed of the turbine’s blades. The processed data is used to monitor acceptable turbine performance and improve wind turbine efficiency.

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