Research On Power Line Tracking Technology Of Quad-rotor UAV Based On Vision

Electricity is an important part of the national economy.In order to ensure the reliable transmission of power resources,high-frequency patrol inspection of power lines is indispensable.Traditional electric power patrol inspection usually adopts manual patrol mode,which can not detect the huge transmission system quickly,efficiently and reliably in harsh environment.This paper presents and develops a power line tracking system based on machine vision and UAV technology.The system uses airborne single-board computer to extract power lines from aerial photographs,and the deviation data between UAV and transmission line is sent to flight control through serial port,thus the power line tracking task through UAV can be completed.The main work of this paper is as follows:1.Combining with the research status of power line inspection using Rotor UAV at home and abroad,a vision-based overall scheme of UAV power line tracing is proposed.The modules needed for the flight platform are selected,assembled and calibrated.2.The dynamic model of the Rotor UAV is established and its control characteristics are studied.The quaternion is used to calculate the airborne sensor data to obtain the attitude angle of the aircraft,and the position and attitude controller of the UAV is designed based on the attitude angle information and image data.3.Aiming at the characteristics of power lines in aerial images are susceptible to noise and background interference,image preprocessing operations such as grayscale,equalization,filtering,noise reduction,threshold segmentation and edge detection are carried out.The improved Hough transform algorithm is used to extract and identify power lines.Mean values of the identified power line parameters are obtained to obtain the fitting traces.4.In the actual environment,a Quad-rotor UAV with a single board computer is used to test the tracking flight of 10 kV power line.Experiments show that the tracking UAV can fly autonomously along the power line,and the image of the tracking process and the real-time status information of the UAV can be observed through the ground station.