AI powered Wind Turbine Inspection
Given the safety hazards and time taken to carry out
wind turbine inspections, it is not surprising that the
use of drones for this purpose is on the rise. Not only
do they help carry out regular inspections but also help
identify and gather data to support warranty claims.
The
conventional manual inspections using ropes and
platforms can at best inspect 2-3 wind turbines a day
while a semi-automatic drone could inspect 12-15
turbines in the same time. A 2 man team consisting of a
drone pilot and sensor operator can maneuver and click
high definition images of different parts of the wind
turbine, typically inspecting each blade in under 10
minutes of flight.
Aerial wind turbine inspections using drones consists of 3 phases

Use of drones instead of humans can cut down the time
required for the first phase by a factor of 6-8 times
and cost by 8-10 times. At the same time, they help
reduce the hired manpower, safety hazards and costs.
The second phase of “Analysing” the collected images can
either be done manually or automatically using cutting
edge machine learning models. The task of manually
looking at hundreds of high definition images is tedious
and mundane which leaves it vulnerable to human errors.
This also consumes significant time and requires hiring
skilled labour who are experienced in this domain. On
the other hand, use of AI for the second phase, suffers
from no such issues resulting in highly accurate
analysis in a cost effective way.
Automating the second phase is where Nanonets fits in.
We build and deploy custom inspection models which
identify and categorize the different kinds of faults
with high accuracy and speed. Each inspection model is
trained and fine tuned to each use case. Depending on
the size, each wind turbine can be covered in 10-20 high
definition images. Our models are capable of analysing
these images at the rate of 2-5 wind turbines a minutes,
covering wind farms within hours. The same analysis
would take days if done manually.
Rate of Analysing Images of Wind turbines
Manually
1 turbine/man/hour
With NanoNets API
100 turbines/hour
Cost of Analysing Images
Without NanoNets
$$$
After integrating NanoNets API
$
