Study on a Boat-Assisted Drone Inspection Scheme for the Modern Large-Scale Offshore Wind Farm

This study proposes a novel and comprehensive boat-assisted drone inspection scheme for offshore wind farms. Specifically, we develop a unique wireless communication model, a detailed wind turbine blade detection model, and a route planning scheme for the drone and boat to formulate the minimum energy consumption problem for drone inspection. Then, we demonstrate that this problem is a combinatorial optimization mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, which we solve by decomposing the optimization problem into four subproblems. Moreover, an improved heuristic algorithm is constructed to solve the optimum energy consumption problem, exploiting these subproblems. The simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves optimal energy consumption for boat-assisted drone inspection. Furthermore, compared with the existing methods, the proposed algorithm obtains the lowest total energy consumption and provides a higher route planning performance for the unmanned aerial vehicle and boat when utilized for offshore wind farm inspection.