Research On Autonomous Obstacle Avoidance Technology For Power Lines Inspection With UAV

Unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)has been widely used in the field of industry and agriculture,which has many advantages such as convenient carrying,simple operation,rich load,low requirement for environment and autonomous flight.UAV is employed for power line inspection,which can efficiently and safely accomplish the task and reduce the labor intensity of the manual inspection.For successfully ensuring the power line inspection flights,one of the key technologies that need to be solved is the autonomous obstacle avoidance with the UAV to the power line and the surrounding obstacles.The technology of autonomous obstacle avoidance for the power line inspection with UAV has been probed and researched in this paper,which is divided into two parts.The first part is to aiming at the known obstacles around the power line in the designated area,modeling the cylindrical barrier space is done to determine the flight boundary and the heuristic improved A-Star algorithm is used to plan the optimal path for the UAV obstacle avoidance.The second part is to aiming at the power line and the surrounding unknown obstacles,which is divided into two cases.The first case is the avoidance of the UAV to the power line,due to the slender and small reflection surface of the power lines,it is difficult for traditional ultrasonic waves to measure them,so the monocular vision method is used to avoid the power lines.The second case is the avoidance of other unknown obstacles,the position information of an UAV relative to the obstacles is obtained by the airborne position sensor,real-time obstacle avoidance to the unknown obstacles is carried by the fuzzy control decision.The results of simulation and test show that the autonomous obstacle avoidance technology of power line inspection with UAV can plan the optimal obstacle avoidance path under the condition of the known obstacles,and conduct real-time obstacle avoidance flight under the condition of the unknown obstacles in this paper,which can ensure the safety of the power line inspection,improve the efficiency and has a broad application prospect.