A 3D Laboratory Test-Platform for Overhead Power Line Inspection

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 testplatform 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.

State‐of‐the‐art technologies for UAV inspections

“…Liu et al [17] at North China Electric Power University developed a platform for power line inspection with UAVs (Table 1). The platform is a 3D space that emulates an environment that UAVs will navigate through (Fig.…”

“… UAV application for inspecting power lines as in Section 3.1 (a) 3D test platform [17], (b) Diagram of UAV flight [18], (c) Infrared images from UAH [19], (d) Computer‐generated red dots identifying tower before filtering [20], and (e) d after filtering [20]…”

Viewpoint Optimization Method for Flying Robot Inspecting Transmission Towers Based on Point Cloud Model

“…Identify with the simulation experiment, each part of transmission tower has a corresponding optimal viewpoint, the practical experiments are made in a 3D test-platform described in Ref. [24] as shown in Fig.14. The observations are shown in Fig.15.…”

An Online Measurement Method for Insulator Creepage Distance on Transmission Lines

“…Besides manually inspecting power lines, which is still the main method, 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 offers considerable cost savings [11]. Some researchers have started to use unmanned helicopters to inspect power lines, such as an applied inspection robot called Smart Copter based on an Unmanned Autonomous Helicopter (UAH) [12]; a low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote-sensing platform, equipped with an optical digital camera, which is used to inspect power line corridors and locate obstacles within the power line corridor with accuracy [13].…”