Autonomous inspection in transmission and distribution power lines – methodology for image acquisition by means of unmanned aircraft system and its treatment and storage

Abstract

Brazil has a national integrated electrical system with more than 120,000 kilometers of Overhead Transmission Lines (OHTL), owned by Transmission and Distribution Companies. Current inspection approaches are obsolete and expensive or don't cover all items to be inspected. In spite of having many academic related works, the use of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) for inspection remains as a challenge for real purposes because, when a project reaches the phase of implementation, many real constraints difficult the process. To overcome this challenge, Celesc (a Santa Catarina Distribution Company) and the Institute of Studies and Energy Management-INERGE are jointly developing a project whose main objective is the development of an integrated system for autonomous inspection of lines using Unmanned Aircraft System of rotary wings and VTOL capacity, with optical and thermal sensors. This article presents the methodology developed or the analysis of inconsistencies in transmission and distribution lines. The results obtained so far, indicate that the methodology will succeed in OHTL inspection, due to the high quality of the images, allowing for identification of existing problems in the line components, thus significantly increasing the efficiency of inspections, mainly in areas of difficult access.

Sensors Fusion and Multidimensional Point Cloud Analysis for Electrical Power System Inspection

“…The use of thermal and visible inspection is vastly applied in the railroad industry, where both the rail and vehicle conditions, as much as the surrounding distribution lines, are subjected to fault risks that can be prevented by analyzing infrared images. Reference [30] mentioned that the inspection labor is done many times by land in a non-effective manner, and brings a solution using a UAV for image data gathering in an automated fashion. Besides the applicable approach, it still relies on many conditions, for example, weather, vehicle line of sight, and channel links quality, not to mention pilot trained personnel.…”

Automated mission planning for aerial large‐scale power plant thermal inspection

“…As a result, UAV-based thermal inspection became state-of-the-art in overhead power line diagnostics. For the last 10 years, a wide range of manual, semiautomatics, and fully autonomous solutions were introduced in this area (Díaz & Cáceres, 2018;Homma et al, 2017;Jalil et al, 2019;Khalyasmaa et al, 2015Khalyasmaa et al, , 2016Komar et al, 2020;Korki et al, 2019;Liu, Yang, et al, 2021). Similar methods can be used to diagnose highvoltage equipment in power plants, but applications in this field are currently rare.…”