The design and application of SmartCopter: An unmanned helicopter based robot for transmission line inspection

Power line inspection is essential work for the maintenance of electric grids. Besides manually inspecting power lines, which is still the main method, helicopters are also used for the inspection from the sky. In the recent years, unmanned flying systems were used for power line inspection in order to reduce the risk. In this paper, the design and application of SmartCopter, an unmanned autonomous helicopter based inspection robot, are described, including the design of flight control, inspection system, safe distance design, ground station, inspection mode, etc. Some inspection results are presented as well.