Research on Determining the Inspection Point of Multirotor UAV Power Tower

Hongxing Wang,Haoran Liu,Zheng Huang,Hang Zhou,Mingduan Feng,Adrian Neagu

doi:10.1155/2021/8894055

Abstract

During the inspection process of power pole towers, manual positioning is mainly used to select the shooting viewpoints of the drone, which leads to erroneous viewpoint selection and inaccurate shootings of inspected objects. Also, neglecting the effect of the sun’s backlight on photographs contributes to poor photo quality that does not meet inspection requirements. Aiming at the selection of shooting viewpoints during multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles’ inspection on power poles, this paper proposes an automatic positioning method that determines the shooting viewpoints by considering UAV performance, airborne camera parameters, and the size of objects to be measured. Considering the factors of sun illumination, we optimize the method to ensure the positions of the viewpoints and to ensure that the images can be clearly generated so that the observers can check the power pole towers through the images when shooting is also taken into consideration. Finally, the automatic calculation method of the related viewpoints is implemented in the Java language. Experiments show that the method can accurately obtain the positions of the drones’ viewpoints and reduce the number of viewpoints, which significantly improves the efficiency and quality of inspection shooting.

Highlights

Power transmission is carried out through the transmission lines on power pole towers
It is very important to ensure the safety of power pole towers and the transmission lines
UAVs have the advantages of light weight, small size, and flexibility. ey can be generally divided into fixed-wing UAVs, multirotor UAVs, and unmanned helicopters. e rotor unmanned aerial vehicles have the characteristics of flexible operation and hovering in the air and is suitable for the inspection work of the power towers [1, 2]

Summary

Introduction

Power transmission is carried out through the transmission lines on power pole towers. Nguyen et al [26] proposed a new vision-based concept of automatic power-line inspection which set UAV inspection as the main inspection method, optical images as the main data source, and deep learning as the basis of data analysis and verification. Most of the research has focused on the vision-based image recognition, coordinate positioning of UAVs and power poles in point cloud data, and how to avoid obstacles and other aspects. There is a lack of study on the selection of the inspection shooting position (viewpoint) of an object to be measured on the power pole tower. Erefore, this paper focuses on researching and solving the problem of automatically determining the inspection viewpoints and shooting angles of multirotor UAVs under the condition of considering the sun illumination and effectively reducing the number of inspection points Manually selecting the shooting viewpoints means shooting the objects on the power pole towers one by one, which will end up having too many viewpoints and being less efficient during inspection. erefore, this paper focuses on researching and solving the problem of automatically determining the inspection viewpoints and shooting angles of multirotor UAVs under the condition of considering the sun illumination and effectively reducing the number of inspection points

Method of Determining Viewpoints Based on Safety Distance

Reduction of the Viewpoint of the Drone

Optimization of the Viewpoint Position Based on the Sun’s Trajectory

Figure 4

12 Viewpoint determination method