Automating Wind Farm Maintenance Using Drones and AI

Turbine maintenance is an expensive, high-risk task. According to a recent analysis from the news website, wind farm owners are expected to spend more than $40 billion on operations and maintenance over a decade. Another recent study finds by using drone-based inspection instead of traditional rope-based inspection, you can reduce the operational costs by 70% and further decrease revenue lost due to downtime by up to 90%. This blog post will present how drones, machine learning (ML), and Internet of Things (IoT) can be utilized on the edge and the cloud to make turbine maintenance safer and more cost effective. First, we trained the machine learning model on the cloud to detect hazards on the turbine blades, including corrosion, wear, and icing.