Toward Fault-Tolerant Coordination in UAV Swarms for Offshore Wind Farm Inspection

Effective inspection of offshore wind farms is essential to maintain their operational reliability. UAVs provide a promising means to reduce inspection costs and duration while minimizing risks to human operators, making them valuable tools for infrastructure health monitoring. When organized as swarms, UAVs can exploit collective intelligence and coordination to improve inspection coverage and efficiency. However, offshore environments impose unique challenges, including limited accessibility and harsh weather conditions, which require the swarm to operate with high fault tolerance. In this work, we introduce FOCUS, a novel mission-level approach for offshore wind farm inspection, that leverages mobile ad hoc connectivity and distributed consensus within a UAV swarm to enable fault-tolerant operations. Emulation-based evaluations show that FOCUS doubles the inspection efficiency compared with baseline approaches while maintaining strong resilience against common failures.