Flight path correction method for UAV intelligent inspection towards moving pontoon boats

To address the problem that pre-set unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) inspection routes become invalid due to barge movement, resulting in the inability to capture inspection images of key components of floating cranes, this paper proposes a flight path correction method based on rigid-body kinematics. This method treats the barge and its associated waypoints as a single rigid body. By utilizing real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning technology onboard the UAV to precisely measure the three-dimensional (3D) pose variation of the barge after displacement, including latitude and longitude offsets, elevation changes, and heading angle deviations, this method employs forward and inverse transformations between geodetic coordinates and spatial Cartesian coordinates to map the barge's pose variation onto each waypoint, synchronously correcting both position coordinates and heading angles. Compared with the iterative optimization strategies of meta-heuristic algorithms, this method does not require the definition of an objective function or search space, has a computational complexity of O(n), and strictly preserves the relative positions of the original waypoints and the inspection coverage logic. Three independent field tests demonstrated that the mean feature point matching rates between the corrected re-flight images and the reference images were 94.61%, 95.64%, and 95.23%, respectively, all consistently above 90%. This performance significantly outperforms the 1.46% achieved with uncorrected flight paths, validating the feasibility and robustness of the proposed method and providing a technical reference for UAV inspections in non-fixed reference scenarios.