A Safe Flight Approach of the UAV in the Electrical Line Inspection

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) inspection for the electrical line has received increasing attentions due to the advantages of low costs, easiness to control and flexibility. The UAV can inspect the electrical tower independently and automatically by planning the flight path. But during the inspection along the path, the UAV is easily impacted by gust wind due to its light weight and small size, which always leads to the crash into the electrical tower. Thus, in this paper, a safe flight approach (SFA) is proposed to make the flight be safer during the inspection. The main contributions include: firstly, the piecewise linear interpolation method is proposed to fit the distribution curve of the electrical towers based on the GPS coordinates of the electrical towers; secondly, the no-fly zone on the both sides of the distribution curve are created, and a security distance formula (SDF) is raised to decide the width of the no-fly zone; thirdly, a gust wind formula (GWF) is proposed to improve the artificial potential field approach, which can contribute to the path planning of the UAV; finally, a flight path of the UAV can be planned using the SFA to make the UAV avoid colliding with the electric tower. The proposed approach is tested on the experiment to demonstrate its effectiveness.