Insulator Aiming Using Multi-Feature Fusion-Based Visual Servo Control for Washing Drone

Abstract

Insulator visual aiming is difficult for washing drone due to the complex washing environment, strong dis-turbance, lack of debugging environment, and other factors. Conventional visual servo control methods often fail to consider these complex factors adequately and fall short in reliable insulator visual aiming. To address these problems, we propose a novel multi-feature fusion-based drone visual servo control method for accurate insulator visual aiming. A multi-feature fusion neural network (MFFNet) is proposed to map the dif-ferent input modalities into an embedding space spanned by the learned deep features. Suitable control commands are generated by the simple combination of learned deep features. These deep features represent the intrinsic structural properties of the insulator and the motion pattern of the drones. Particularly, our method is trained purely in simulation and transferred to a real drone directly. Moreover, accurate visual aiming is guaranteed even in strong disturbance environments. Simulation and experimental results verify the high accurate insulator aiming, anti-disturbance, and sim-to-real transfer capabilities of the proposed method. Video: https://youtu.be/Ptlajzvp46A.