Application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Hangar in Transmission Tower Inspection Considering the Risk Probabilities of Steel Towers

Abstract

As a typical Internet of Things (IoT) application of the transmission grid, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is the most feasible solution to replace conventional human maintenance resources during the inspection of power transmission lines. However, limited by the flying range and endurance time, it cannot realize the goal of full-autonomous inspection proposed by the State Grid. Based on the UAV inspection technology and the emerging UAV hangar, a new idea of using smart hangar as a connection point to realize full-autonomous inspection of UAV is proposed in this paper. And then making full use of the smart hangar to solve the battery capacity problem existing in the process of autonomous inspection of UAV. Finally, according to the inspection requirements of transmission towers, the fixed-wing UAV is used for long-distance inspection, and the path planning mathematical model considering the risk probabilities of towers and objective functions is established. Simulation results show that the scheme proposed in this paper can effectively solve the existed problems of UAV inspection.

Keywords

• Transmission line inspection
• UAV smart hangar
• risk probability
• fully-autonomous UAV inspection
• path planning