Accelerating Power Grid Monitoring with Flying Robots and Artificial Intelligence

The digital revolution is expected to surpass all previous economic transformations in scale, scope, and complexity. Digital technologies are making electrical grids more connected, more reliable, and sustainable. Several efforts have been made to revamp the electric grid and modernize century-old systems. In the near future, we expect to see a revolution in power grind monitoring with incredible results through artificial intelligence and big data, drones, among others. The business opportunity for using drones in the energy sector is impressive, although very few companies have joined in its implementation. The drone allows the safe remote overflight of high voltage power lines. They can be deployed to detect, inspect, and diagnose the defects of the power line infrastructure. In this article, we provide the state of the art of using drones in smart grid monitoring. We demonstrate and propose an architecture based on Faster R-CNN for detecting ice accretion on power lines. Finally, we shed light on opportunities and future trends of these emerging technologies that can guide future research directions