The capabilities and effectiveness of remote inspection of wind turbines

Abstract This paper evaluates the effectiveness of remote inspections of wind turbines. The first part of the paper presents a usability test where remote inspections with a robot prototype have been directly compared to manned inspections. The experiment had 31 participants that did inspections with and without the robot in a laboratory environment. As expected, it was challenging to remotely operate the robot, and the remote inspections did not perform as well as the manned. However, the difference was not very large and some possible improvements were identified. Concerns with remote inspections of wind turbines that were not addressed by the experiment is discussed in the last part of this paper. These will be evaluated in upcoming field trials.