Path planning algorithms for power transmission line inspection using unmanned aerial vehicles

The effectiveness and efficiency of using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for automated power transmission line inspection is tightly related to the inspection paths designed for UAV. Different types of UAV are suitable for different inspection tasks and have different requirements for path planning. Based on the contents of the transmission line inspection, it can be divided into tower monitoring and line corridor monitoring. First, according to the characteristics of the tower monitoring, the multi-rotor UAV is used for the tower inspection. By considering the safe distance bewteen UAV and the tower and the features of the camera, the genetic algorithm (GA) is used to design a rational inspection path. Then, according to the requirements of the line corridor monitoring mission, the fixed-wing UAV is used for long distance inspection and the path planning mathematical model and objective function are established. Polar coordinate coding is used to overcome the restrictions of the maximum path deflection angle, the minimum step length and the number of the maximum path nodes. The GA and genetic simulated annealing (GSA) algorithms are used to obtain effective inspection paths. Simulation results show that the proposed optimization scheme in this paper can find the optimal inspection paths.