Drone path planning for 500KV transmission tower inspection

Abstract

For the inspection of large-scale transmission towers, most of the traditional inspections are manual, which often have problems such as long working hours, harsher working environments, and the need for large amounts of manpower and material resources. With the development of UAV, and image processing technology, the inspection of transmission towers based on rotor UAVs has achieved great development. To meet the application requirements of overhead line inspection of distribution network, the use of UAV inspection technology is proposed. We built a model to optimize inspection and find a good inspection route for UAV visual inspection of transmission towers. The goal of this model is to maximize a function that incorporates the three performances of time of flight, image quality, and tower coverage. This paper uses Particle Pwarm Optimization algorithm based on UAV inspection of transmission towers to solve the problem. The experiment proves that the scheme proposed in this paper can well provide excellent flight routes for UAV inspection of large high voltage towers