An Intelligent Route Planning Algorithm for UAV Autonomous Inspection on Insulators

In order to improve the route planning efficiency of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) when inspecting insulators on power transmission lines, a new algorithm is proposed to carry out intelligent route planning for UAVs to perform patrol tasks. In the first place, a single recommended UAV hover point can be calculated by the proposed algorithm, taking into account the shooting posture, distance, height and range constraints of UAV hover points. Then, after all the recommended hover points are determined by calculations, the points can thus be connected into a set of lines to finally form an entire UAV patrol route. Compared with manually controlled UAV inspection, the efficiency of the proposed method has been greatly improved, which can be applied to large-scale inspection tasks of insulators on power transmission lines.