An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Path Planning Method for Automatic Acceptance of Overhead Transmission Lines

High-quality acceptance of overhead transmission lines (OTLs) before commissioning is essential for safety and reliability. However, manual acceptance may result in low detection rate and long time period. Automatic acceptance using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is a practical way to solve the problem. Considering the complex scene around the tower, path planning of the UAV is a key part of automatic acceptance. In this paper, based on the prior information of the tower and the point cloud of OTL, a UAV path planning method is proposed. We first generate ideal paths and then use voxelized point cloud to create obstacle avoidance model, which is used to modify the ideal paths. The given paths support collecting high-quality point cloud and image data of the tower, which contribute to automatic acceptance of OTL. Applications show that the proposed method keeps a balance between efficiency and data quality under the premise of ensuring safety.