D. Sharoni, A.M. Peres
UAV-Hive Inc.,
United States
Keywords: sustainable integration into nation's grid, EV ground-station, distributed energy resources (DER), military airport runways, pilot training, wind turbine, renewable energy, decarbonization, photovoltaic, scalability, flexibility, real-time, data analytics, massive data redundancy, dispatch-ability, UAV’s safety algorithms, synchronized fleet of drones, tight synchronization in-formation, mesh wireless telecommunications, solar-powered electric vehicle
Summary:
Technical Abstract: Sustainability & Efficiency Innovations Symposium UAV-Hive is hereby submitting our innovation to the Sustainability & Efficiency Innovations Symposium. In this symposium, we offers solutions that can sustainably and efficiently innovate in the inspection of large renewable facilities, by lowering cost and facilitating secure integration into the Nation’s energy grid. We are also addressing the interest area of improving the Operation and Maintenance (O&M) of large scale geographical areas facilities by providing a hardware and software integrated platform that is a robust and scalable airborne robotic inspection system, primarily designed for photovoltaic utility-solar sites, but can provide many other large area use-cases (i.e: wind turbines, microgrids, large military airport runways, geothermal, military pilot training simulators and various others). Our approach integrates various technologies into one scalable platform tailored for large-scale utility-solar plants. Four of several innovative integration designs are: 1-UAV’s safety algorithms enabling synchronized fleet of drones in-flight formation; 2-Mesh wireless telecommunications to boost network range/data-quality; 3-Create and analyze 3D Model scanned by 6 synchronized UAV squadron; 4-Decarbonized dispatchable ground-station mounted on a solar-powered electric vehicle. Utilizing this innovation, an entire inspection mission completes at near real-time at flight speeds of >20mph with the platform ready to be immediately dispatched to the next mission location. O&M benefits from this solution’s massive inspection dataset processed by AI and Machine Learning analytics and predictive maintenance algorithms. That continuously improve photovoltaic production and reduce maintenance cost. The utility solar photovoltaic site will benefit by an estimated 15-20% production increase, while the 6 UAV inspection squadron benefits by >80% cost reduction, Deployment flexibility in the number of UAVs per Hive or number of hives enables even higher benefits . These results, compare to the current state-of-the-art of a single drone approach that takes 6, or more times longer, requires several battery swaps, has inefficient data generation and slow cloud-based processing. During Phase I, we will prove our following concepts: Achieve 3 drones squadron tight In-flight formation with collision avoidance. Test a mesh wireless network range beyond 10 km at 4K video streaming performance. Create utility-solar PV field 3D Model scanned by 3 synchronized UAVs squadron. Establish dispatchable Ground Station link via mesh wireless network to the airborne UAV hive. The department of defense (DoD) is the largest consumer of energy in the u.s. government, yet it relies on the local electrical distribution systems and grids that surround each military base. the army has realized that dependence on local energy grids creates a national security concern. Solar energy is distributed globally, utility-solar plants are distributed, too. DOE will benefit by enabling a cost effective, predictive maintenance approach that will accelerate the deployment of utility-solar energy generation, secure their connection to the Nation’s grid reliably and support an equitable transition to a decarbonized electricity system by 2035 and that of the entire energy generation decarbonization by 2050.