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The effective monitoring and maintenance of power lines are becoming increasingly important due to a global growing dependence on electricity. The costs and risks associated with the traditional foot patrol and helicopter-based inspections can be reduced by using UAVs with the appropriate sensors. However, this implies developing algorithms to make the power line inspection process reliable and autonomous. In order to overcome the limitations of visual methods in the presence of poor light and noisy backgrounds, we propose to address the problem of power line detection and modeling based on LiDAR. The PL 2 DM, Power Line LiDAR-based Detection and Modeling, is a novel approach to detect power lines. Its basis is a scan-by-scan adaptive neighbor minimalist comparison for all the points in a point cloud. The power line final model is obtained by matching and grouping several line segments, using their collinearity properties. Horizontally, the power lines are modeled as a straight line, and vertically as a catenary curve. Using a real dataset, the algorithm showed promising results both in terms of outputs and processing time, adding real-time object-based perception capabilities for other layers of processing.

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This paper presents results of the INESC TEC participation in the maritime environment (both at surface and underwater) integrated in the ICARUS team in the euRathlon 2015 robotics search and rescue competition. These relate to the marine robots from INESC TEC, surface (ROAZ USV) and underwater (MARES AUV) autonomous vehicles participation in multiple tasks such as situation assessment, underwater mapping, leak detection or victim localization. This participation was integrated in the ICARUS Team resulting of the EU funded project aimed to develop robotic tools for large scale disasters. The coordinated search and rescue missions were performed with an initial surface survey providing data for AUV mission planning and execution. A situation assessment bathymetry map, sidescan sonar imaging and location of structures, underwater leaks and victims were achieved, with the global ICARUS team (involving sea, air and land coordinated robots) participating in the final grand Challenge and achieving the second place. I. 978-1-4673-9724-7/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE