Overview on Photovoltaic Inspections Procedure by means of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Inspection of photovoltaic power plants is a crucial aspect for improving the performances and increasing their profitability. The reduced O&M budget pushes the market to more effective inspection procedures. In this framework, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have been proved to be very effective for the reduced amount of time required and for the higher quality of the obtained information with respect to traditional inspections. Furthermore UAVs application becomes very attractive if combined with artificial intelligence and computational techniques for the fast and effective analysis of the large amount of data (in the great majority of the cases of pictures) get by UAVs. In this paper, an overview on the entire inspection process, from the planning to the exploitation of the results obtained is provided. All the aspects are analysed and the open issues highlighted.