A Distributed Photovoltaic Operation and Maintenance Cloud Platform for PV Aerial Inspections With Sparse Industrial Data

Abstract

Distributed photovoltaic (DPV) power sites in industrial parks are characterized by dispersed layouts, practical fault detection environments, and high safety requirements. Conventional manual DPV O&M systems using handheld sensors are inefficient, expensive, and struggle with fault detection due to sparse industrial data and uni-modal information limitations. To this, this paper proposes an innovative advanced algorithm for DPV fault detection in industrial parks, utilizing a new sparse industrial dataset, “SolarPark,” collected via multi-modal UAVs and annotated through a multi-expert process with uncertainty scoring. By fusing the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN), Ghost modules, the algorithm enhances attention to critical photovoltaic fault-related channel information, strengthens multi-scale photovoltaic fault feature fusion, and achieves lightweight efficiency. Combined with multi-modal UAV videos, the proposed industrial DPV fault detection algorithm achieves a precision of 95.4%, effectively ensuring the efficiency of DPV power sites in data-scarce industrial scenarios. Extensive experiments on the developed cloud platform confirm the proposed algorithm’s efficient, cost-effective, and easy to deploy for aerial inspections of DPV O&M systems.