LOCATOR - Lightweight and Low-Cost Autonomous Drone System for Overhead Cable Detection and Soft Grasping

Abstract

Reaching and performing operations on overhead power line cables is challenging and mainly carried out by helicopters or foot patrol. This paper proposes a light-weight and low-cost drone platform for detecting overhead cables to autonomously grasp them through an integrated soft gripper. The cable detection system utilizes a pair of solid-state LiDARs with differing field-of-views and a small onboard companion computer to detect 38mm cables while maintaining accurate alignment to perform grasping. A full drone airframe with a soft gripper has been designed, analyzed and manufactured to serve this work. A set of algorithms and software tools have been developed to accomplish an autonomous drone mission to reach a cable. The overall drone system (LOCATOR) has been tested and validated in simulation and verified in an outdoor setup that reflects the real power line infrastructure.

Design, Integration and Implementation of an Intelligent and Self-recharging Drone System for Autonomous Power line Inspection

“…Considering the authors' previous work, the proposed system presents an extension and integration of their previous take on developing autonomous drone systems for power line alignment and grasping, wireless battery charging, and realtime fault detection. [16][6] [17].…”

Safe Local Aerial Manipulation for the Installation of Devices on Power Lines: AERIAL-CORE First Year Results and Designs

“…Even though UAVs are faster, more accurate, and cost-effective, the working range for UAVs is limited to the pilot's visual line of sight. To overcome this limitation, onboard sensors and navigation algorithms are embedded into the UAVs to enable the system autonomy to inspect cables, beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) [18,19].…”

Pneumatic-Mechanical Systems in UAVs: Autonomous Power Line Sensor Unit Deployment

“…The navigation and alignment of the drone was undertaken using an onboard computer (Raspberry Pi 4 4GB) running Ubuntu 18.04 and Robot Operating System (ROS) Melodic; the flight controller operates using the PX4 Flight stack [33], with the MAVROS package [34] being employed as the middleware between ROS and computer. The sensor hardware used to aid with alignment was taken from the works of [18], with the LeddarTech VU8 48 • and 100 • solid-state LiDARs being denoted as VU48 and VU100 respectively.…”

“…Our proposed system presents an extension to our previous work [18], and its capability towards safely and autonomously deploying a sensor unit onto an active high voltage power line. As found in our previous works, we use two solid-state segmented LiDARs for detecting and aligning with the cable through the steps as seen in Fig.…”