OSO PEQUEÑO: WIND FARM INSPECTION ROVER

Abstract

PROJECT GOAL: To design and build an autonomous rover prototype from scratch that can autonomously navigate a wind farm to collect and extract data from wind turbine footage. PROJECT DESCRIPTION: Wind farms are oen situated in remote locations, with their turbines spread across a large land area. As the world shis to renewable energy, demand for autonomous surveyor robots will grow to help monitor and improve efficiency of wind farms. The rover design is based on an electric All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV). The rover includes a gimbal mounted camera to record wind turbines, weather instrumentation to measure wind speed and direction, a GPS module attached to a Raspberry Pi4 used to generate a navigation for the rover, a TFmini Plus Li-DAR module for obstacle avoidance, and two 12V 50Ah Lithium batteries, a Monocrystalline 120-Watt Solar Panel, and solar charge controller providing a renewable source of power for the rover. This equipment has been assembled and integrated onto the ATV frame, with soware allowing the rover to traverse along a navigational way-point path to collect turbine video and weather conditions autonomously. An external soware package was created for post-processing the collected wind turbine footage to determine the rotational speed of the turbineʼs blades. The processed data is used to monitor acceptable turbine performance and improve wind turbine efficiency. The Project was determined to meet the following criteria: ● The rover shall navigate using series of pre-programmed GPS coordinates ● The rover shall be able to take measurements of wind speed, direction, temperature, and record video footage of turbines ● The rover shall slow down and stop if an obstacle is detected in its path, and resume if or when it is cleared ● The rover shall be able to traverse over terrain with minor bumps and elevation changes ● The rover shall be powered entirely by an on-board solar panel ● Rover shall inspect 3 turbines per outing, and make 1 outing per week External soware shall assist a user in determining turbine blade RPM by tracking color changes in a point of the footage.