Intelligent Inspection and Deicing System for Power Transmission Lines Based on UAV Platform

In recent years, the problem of icing on power transmission lines caused by extreme weather has become increasingly serious. Traditional manual inspections are inefficient, costly, and pose safety risks. An intelligent, high-precision integrated inspection and deicing solution is urgently needed. To address this problem, this study proposes an intelligent inspection and deicing system for power transmission lines based on an unmanned aerial vehicle platform. First, a multimodal sensor fusion unmanned aerial vehicle inspection platform is designed, integrating a high-resolution visible light camera, an infrared thermal imager, and a lidar. Secondly, an icing target detection model is constructed based on the improved YOLOv5 (You Only Look Once version 5) algorithm, and a transfer learning strategy is introduced to optimize the pre-training weights to improve the recognition accuracy of icing thickness and position. Finally, a modular deicing device is designed, using a lightweight robotic arm equipped with a high-frequency ultrasonic and microwave composite deicing unit to achieve efficient deicing and energy consumption control. The experimental results show that the system based on the YOLOv5 algorithm can stably identify ice layers in complex environments, especially in ice layers of different thicknesses (1mm to 15mm), with a detection accuracy of 92.3%, which is better than the accuracy of YOLOv4 and Faster R-CNN. In terms of deicing efficiency, the microwave composite deicing technology has low energy consumption while ensuring efficient deicing, and has a good cost-effectiveness. The maximum deicing efficiency reaches 7.5 kg/min and the energy consumption is 42.5 Wh. Comprehensive evaluation shows that the operating efficiency and stability of the proposed system in extreme weather conditions have been significantly improved, providing an efficient and reliable solution for intelligent inspection and deicing of transmission lines.