Monocular Assisted Localization For Flying Robot Based On The3D Model Of Power Pylon

In the process of overhead power line inspection, under the premise of ensuring the safety of equipments, a flying robot is required to collect a large number of images of the key areas of power pylons flexibly. This requires the flying robot can access the absolute position of the power tower and itself in the world coordinate system, or acquire the relative positional relationship between itself and the electrical towers in real time. Considering the reliability, ease of use and economic costs, an in-depth research on monocular camera pose estimation has been carried out.Firstly, the basic principle of point cloud based pose estimation and model based pose estimation has been analyzed. Combined with the task of power line inspection background, by applied those two methods to the process of camera pose estimation, the advantages, disadvantages and respective coverage has been discussed.Secondly, the sequence image matching method in the acquisition process of the scene’s point cloud has been improved, to make it more suitable for the orderly collection of images.Thirdly, a novel approach for the initialization procedure of a model-based tracking system has been proposed. Experimental results show that this proposed method has the same precision compared with the manual initialization result.Finally, by analyzing the deficiencies of the model based pose estimation method, a multiple infrared camera system has been designed and implemented which is suitable for global pose estimation in the indoor environment. The system could provide a rough initial guess of a camera’s pose every frame. A better camera pose could be obtained by tracking the wireframe model of the object under the guidance of the initial pose. And it could improve the pose estimation result by reducing the cumulative error in the model based pose estimation process. Experimental results show that this method has high validity and reliability.