Abstract
Using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for performing automatic inspection of overhead power lines instead of foot patrols is an attractive option, since doing so is safer and have considerable cost savings, among other advantages. The purpose of this paper is to design a 3D laboratory test-platform to simulate UAVs' inspection of transmission lines and secondly, proposing an automated inspection strategy for UAVs in order to follow transmission lines. The construction and system architecture of our 3D test-platform is described in this paper. The inspection strategy contributes to knowledge pertaining to an automated inspection procedure and includes two steps: flight path planning for UAVs and visual tracking of the transmission lines. The 3D laboratory test-platform is applied to test the performance of the proposed strategy and the tracking results of our inspection strategy are subsequently presented. The availability of the 3D laboratory test-platform and the efficiency of our tracking algorithm are verified by experiments.
Highlights
Overhead power line inspection is an essential task for the maintenance of electrical grids, since the fault of power transmission equipment can cause power outages, which can directly lead to the failure of nodes in other service providers such as Internet communication networks, hospitals, residential areas, etc
Flight path planning: plan the flight path of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to guarantee a safe distance from overhead power lines and Motion space improve inspection quality; Y
1 2 n−2 n−1 has the following advantages: it ensures that the produced control points satisfy the requirement of safe distance and that it maintains the geometric property of overhead power lines, which can contribute to capturing good quality images for targets
Summary
Overhead power line inspection is an essential task for the maintenance of electrical grids, since the fault of power transmission equipment can cause power outages, which can directly lead to the failure of nodes in other service providers such as Internet communication networks, hospitals, residential areas, etc. The camera sightline direction has been controlled by an operator in order to keep desired object at the center of image This is known as target selection and tracking. It is desirable to track the overhead power line automatically in order to have the target at the centre of images at all times. An inspection strategy is proposed to track the overhead power lines for the camera on UAVs by combining these two strategies. A safe flight path is planned for UAVs according to inspection rules and the coordinates of overhead power lines; the pose of camera can be computed based on the planned safe flight path.
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