Design of a multi-robot system for wind turbine maintenance.
Franko, Josef Du, Shengdzi Kallweit, Stephan Duelberg, Enno Engemann, Heiko
Franko, Josef
Du, Shengdzi
Kallweit, Stephan
Duelberg, Enno
Engemann, Heiko
Citations
Altmetric:
Abstract
The maintenance of wind turbines is of growing importance considering the transition to renewable energy. This paper presents a multi-robot-approach for automated wind turbine
maintenance including a novel climbing robot. Currently, wind turbine maintenance remains a manual task, which is monotonous, dangerous, and also physically demanding due to the large scale of wind turbines. Technical climbers are required to work at significant heights, even in bad weather conditions. Furthermore, a skilled labor force with sufficient knowledge in repairing fiber composite material is rare. Autonomous mobile systems enable the digitization of the maintenance process. They can be designed for weather-independent operations. This work contributes to the development and experimental validation of a maintenance system consisting of multiple robotic platforms for a variety of tasks, such as wind turbine tower and rotor blade service. In this work, multicopters with vision and LiDAR sensors for global inspection are used to guide slower climbing robots. Light-weight magnetic climbers with surface contact were used to analyze structure parts with non-destructive inspection methods and to locally repair smaller defects. Localization was enabled by adapting odometry for conical-shaped surfaces considering additional navigation sensors. Magnets were suitable for steel towers to clamp onto the surface. A friction-based climbing ring robot (SMART—Scanning, Monitoring, Analyzing, Repair and Transportation) completed the set-up for higher payload. The maintenance period could be extended by using weather-proofed maintenance
robots. The multi-robot-system was running the Robot Operating System (ROS). Additionally, first steps towards machine learning would enable maintenance staff to use pattern classification for fault diagnosis in order to operate safely from the ground in the future.
Description
Date
2020-05-18
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
MDPI
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
wind turbine maintenance, Climbing robot, Low cost, Weather independent operations, Condition monitoring, Odometry on wind turbines