A monocular-based navigation approach for unmanned aerial vehicle safe and autonomous transmission-line inspection

Abstract

This article presents a monocular-based navigation approach for unmanned aerial vehicle safe and continuous inspection along one side of transmission lines. To this end, a navigation model based on the transmission tower and the transmission-line vanishing point was proposed, and the following three key issues were addressed. First, a deep-learningbased object detection and a fast and smooth tracking algorithm based on the kernelized correlation filter were combined to locate transmission tower timely and reliably. Second, the vanishing point of transmission lines was computed and optimized to provide unmanned aerial vehicle with a robust and precise flight direction. Third, to keep a stable safe distance from transmission lines, the transmission lines were first rectified by optimizing a homography matrix to eliminate the parallel distortion, and then their interval variation was estimated for reflecting the spatial distance variation. Finally, the real distance from transmission tower was measured by the triangulation across multiple views. The proposed navigation approach and the designed UAV platform were tested in a field environment, which achieved an encouraging result. To the best of authors' knowledge, this article marks the first time that a safe and continuous navigation approach along one side of transmission lines is put forward and implemented.

Trajectory optimization of an unmanned aerial–aquatic rotorcraft navigating between air and water

“…Specifically, M1, M2, M3, and M4 denote the four rotors, a denotes the angle of attack, and q denotes the pitch angle. The equations describing the motion of UAAR in xoz plane are shown in equations (1)…”

“…Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are increasingly attracting attention in recent years due to their wide range of applications in monitoring, inspection, and rescue. 1 UAVs can perform searching and shooting tasks in air, and AUVs can explore underwater topography and detect water quality. 2 The aerial and underwater vehicles are well adapted to their respective operating environments and can perform their assigned tasks satisfactorily.…”

Tracking for inspection in energy transmission power lines using unmanned aerial vehicles: a systematic review of current and specific literature

“…In general, in the article the UAV is manufactured by the team itself or with partnerships as in [9][10][11][12][13]21], which provides a reduced cost and better fits the researcher's needs as presented by the authors. Was an alternative in [8,13,14] adapt prefabricated or rack-mounted UAVs that generate a higher cost, mainly in maintenance. The authors of the articles [7,11,12,15] used, in addition to the basic material, LIDAR (light detection and variation) [22], a pulsed laser optical technology that measures light reflection to obtain distance from objects, and other laser types, considerably increase the cost of the solution, but increasing the accuracy of the laser line tracking.…”

“…Figure 4. Schematic diagram for Yam angle measurement [7] In [8], the Kernelized Correlation Filter (KCF) algorithm [23] was used for locating and tracking between towers, this method uses rolling matrix properties to increase processing speed. This technique is known to be efficient, but costly to track lines.…”

Part-based multi-task deep network for autonomous indoor drone navigation

“…Recently, off-the-shelf drones have become cheaper, and widely used for tasks such as emergency response (Michael et al, 2012), search and rescue (Bejiga et al, 2017), navigation for transmission-line inspection (Hui et al, 2019) and surveillance (Faessler et al, 2016; Scherer et al, 2012). For safer flight operation, autonomous navigation has attracted increased attention (Kim and Chen, 2015; Achtelik et al, 2009).…”