After the tests, a workshop with stakeholders in Lisbon brought together more than 40 stakeholders and led to more than 20 B2B meetings between industry partners and DURABLE's key technology partners.

On July 20th 2022, EDP NEW, Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) of Lisbon and the Basque Energy Cluster, in collaboration with DURABLE partners organized a singular event focused on novel technologies linked to aerial inspection and manipulation of wind and solar farms, additive manufacturing, non-destructive testing, remote control or augmented reality, which allows improving operation and maintenance technologies and increasing the efficiency and uptime of wind and solar farms. The workshop was held at the Sheraton Lisboa Hotel & Spa and had more than 40 attendees.

This workshop demonstrated novel technologies developed in DURABLE such as the automation of inspection and repair tasks or the rapid replacement of parts, reducing costs and improving the productivity of the new wind and solar plants. During the workshop, key technology partners presented their contributions to the project's outcome, and they shared the latest knowledge and trends in the sector, focusing mostly on solar energy.
Roundtable of experts in Lisbon
The event started with a roundtable on the future of O&M in photovoltaic plants, moderated by EDP NEW and with speakers from relevant industrial companies in the solar energy sector, such EDP Renewables (Ricardo Janeiro Silva), InTech (António Leitão), Above (Luca Piccini) and Voltalia (Vasco Vieira).
They discussed topics such as the main challenges regarding O&M activities, disruptive technologies, the influence of drones and robots in the future of O&M technicians, digital twins, the relevance of sensorization, automatization, and digitalization, new technologies that will replace human driven jobs, or agrivoltaics, among others.
Presentation of DURABLE partners
During the workshop, key technology partners presented their contributions to the project's outcome:
• VICE (Virtual Immersive Cockpit Environment): A versatile virtual cockpit to remotely supervise and control a multi-system of heterogeneous vehicles. Olivier Larre (ESTIA)
• Non-destructive inspection of solar farms using Electroluminescence and Thermography. Pablo Lopez (LORTEK)
• A cooperative team of UAVs to support inspection operations in solar plants. Jesús Capitán (University of Seville)
• Ground navigation technologies and ground support for aerial and terrestrial robot inspection of PV farms. Pedro U Lima (Instituto Superior Técnico IST)
• From autonomous drone inspection to digital twin. Ibon Diez (ALERION)
B2B meetings
The workshop in Lisbon ended with an interesting session of B2B meetings where attendees had the opportunity to generate business contacts and partnerships with DURABLE's key technology partners. More than 20 short meetings were held between industrial companies and DURABLE partners, which served as a first contact for future collaboration.
Previous regional workshops
This workshop was the third and also the last one of a series of regional workshops. The first one was held in Bilbao on April 6th during the Wind Europe Annual Event, with a clear focus on wind energy. The second one was held in Bristol on April 28th, with a focus on both wind and solar PV, and the third one held in Lisbon on July 20th was focussed mainly on solar PV energy.
Needs to be highlighted that in all the cases the B2B sessions were highly relevant, proof of this being a total of 35 short meetings and more than 60 contacts established between stakeholders and DURABLE partners in all the three workshops.
DURABLE has reached its end
The DURABLE project, in which a consortium that brings together 10 partners from the 5 Atlantic countries has been working together for three and a half years, is coming to its end. Now the partners are in the last stage of the project which consists of the validation of the technologies developed during the last years. In that sense, two pilots were planned, one to validate technologies applied to O&M of solar PV farms, and the second one to validate technologies applied to O&M of wind farms. The first pilot was held on July in EDPR's Monte das Flores PV Farm (Portugal), where the partners carried out the following tests:
• Two UGVs from IST navigated around the solar park to collect GPS plus LIDAR data and based on advanced algorithms returned a 3D representation of the scenario. The resulting map provided the means for a redundant map-based navigation besides the GPS/RTK system.
• LORTEK and IST performed thermographic inspections by means of an autonomous UGV and high-resolution thermal cameras. The UGV navigated autonomously between strings of panels based on advanced navigation algorithms with GPS/RTK and LIDAR systems. A set of panels were autonomously visited by the UGV, where the onboard manipulator performed scanning movements over each target panel to perform the inspection with the thermal camera.
• A drone from UWE Bristol and a UGV from IST were remotely controlled from France by means of a virtual cockpit developed by ESTIA through the internet, using a 4G connection directly from the drone and the UGV into the local mobile data network.
• Partners from University of Seville tested their drones for the support of inspection operations in the solar plant
• Cooperative inspection missions between drones (University of Seville) and ground robots (IST). On the one hand, after an aerial inspection by a drone, a ground robot was commanded to visit a specific panel for closer inspection. On the other hand, a drone was used to monitor the inspection operation of a ground robot.
• IST also showed the tracking of and landing on an UGV by an autonomous UAV, using visual servoing methods.
The second pilot will be held in September and partners will test and validate their technologies on a wind farm in France where VALEMO operates. The outcomes of these two pilots will lead to the conclusions of the project and most likely to further collaboration in the future between the partners.