Stanislav A. Eroshenko’s research while affiliated with Ural Federal University and other places

Industrial inspection is a well-known application area for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), but are modern market-available drones fully suitable for inspections of larger-scale industrial facilities? This review summarizes the pros and cons of aerial large-scale facility inspection, distinguishing it from other inspection scenarios implemented with drones. Moreover, based on paper analysis and additionally performed experimental studies, it reveals specific issues related to modern commercial drone software and demonstrates that market-available UAVs (including DJI and Autel Robotics) more or less suffer from the same problems. The discovered issues include a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Real Time Kinematic (RTK) shift, an identification of multiple images captured from the same point, limitations of custom mission generation with external tools and mission length, an incorrect flight time prediction, an unpredictable time of reaching a waypoint with a small radius, deviation from the pre-planned route line between two waypoints, a high pitch angle during acceleration/deceleration, an automatic landing cancellation in a strong wind, and flight monitoring issues related to ground station software. Finally, on the basis of the paper review, we propose solutions to these issues, which helped us overcome them during the first autonomous inspection of a 2400 megawatts thermal power plant.

span>Global digital transformation of the energy sector has led to the emergence of multiple digital platform solutions, the implementation of which have revealed new problems associated with continuous growth of data volumes requiring new approaches to their processing and analysis. This article is devoted to the improper application of machine learning approaches and flawed interpretation of their output at various stages of decision support systems development: data collection; model development, training and testing as well as industrial implementation. As a real industrial case study, the article examines the power generation forecasting problem of photovoltaic power plants. The authors supplement the revealed problems with the corresponding recommendation for industrial specialists and software developers.</span