A multi-objective UAV path planning model for power transmission tower inspection

Although unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely applied in transmission line inspections, flight path planning for the detailed inspection of individual transmission towers remains underexplored, particularly regarding 3D structural modeling, the coupling between image quality and path planning, and constraint handling. To address these gaps, this paper proposes a multi-objective UAV flight path planning model for detailed single-tower inspection. With the objectives of minimizing flight distance and maximizing image quality, the model adaptively adjusts the inspection radius and layer heights and carries out comprehensive inspection of the tower and the crossarm. Four multi-objective evolutionary algorithms were applied to solve the model. The results indicate that NSGA-III performs optimally, achieving full tower coverage and zero penalty. The comparative experiments against an equal-height coverage model and a random model show that the proposed model effectively alleviates the uneven coverage caused by fixed-layer deployment and the diminishing marginal benefit resulting from random point placement, while achieving full regional coverage and significantly reducing the path repetition rate. This study provides an efficient, safe, and high-precision mathematical planning paradigm for autonomous detailed UAV inspection of transmission towers.