Vision-based autonomous navigation approach for unmanned aerial vehicle transmission-line inspection

Abstract

This article presents an autonomous navigation approach based on a transmission tower for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) power line inspection. For this complex vision task, a perspective navigation model, which plays an important role in the description and analysis of the flight strategy, is introduced. Based on the proposed navigation model, valuable cues are excavated from a perspective image, which enhances the capability of the perception of three-dimensional direction and simultaneously improves the safety of intelligent inspection. Specifically, for robust and continuous localization of the transmission tower, a developed detecting-tracking visual strategy-comprised tower detection based on a faster regionbased convolutional neural network and tower tracking by kernelized correlation filters-is presented. Further, segmentation by fully convolutional networks is applied to the extraction of transmission lines, from which the vanishing point (VP), an important basis for determining the flight heading, can be obtained. For more robust navigation, the designed scheme addresses the scenario of a nonexistent VP. Finally, the proposed navigation approach and constructed UAV platform were evaluated in a practical environment and achieved satisfactory results. To the best of our knowledge, this article marks the first time that a navigation approach based on a transmission tower is proposed and implemented.

Vision-Based Path Finding Strategy of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Electrical Infrastructure Purpose

“…Line segments which pass this evaluation are power line candidates. Another possibility is to use deep learning methods and contextual information in order to improve the detection [1].…”

“…The tower detection process is done mainly using computer vision techniques based in machine learning methods such as neural networks, SVM [19,20] and recently deep learning [1]. The process requires a training stage.…”

“…The recent advances in computer vision methods for object detection towards the use of deep learning methods. These algorithms can be implemented on onboard computers provided with GPU (graphics processing unit) for accelerating computation [1].…”

“…There exist numerous applications for UAVs that include autonomous navigation, tracking and 3D reconstruction [1][2][3]. Electrical infrastructure inspection with aerial robots, especially transmission line inspection, is very important since it can minimize costs, risk and logistic problems that usually are associated with manual inspection [4].…”

Development of an autonomous object transfer system by an unmanned aerial vehicle based on binocular vision

“…In order to increase the autonomy level of unmanned vehicles and reduce human intervention, a number of efforts and researches have been made. 3,4 In order to keep up with the trend of research, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Innovation Grand Prix (UAVGP) hosted by Aviation Industry Corporation of China was held on November 2-4, 2018, in Anji, China. Thirteen teams from different regions participated in the competition.…”