A Somatosensory-Operation-Based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Power Line Inspection in First Person of View

In China, Overhead Transmission Lines cover a wide range of areas, and cross complex terrain as well as harsh environment. Therefore, power inspection has become an essential task to ensure the safety and stability of the power system. In recent years, the application of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) in the inspection, which has overcome most shortcomings of manual lines inspection, has attracted wide attention and implementation. However, the operation of UAV inspection nowadays still requires high level of techniques for the operator, and it needs two operators or above to cooperate simultaneously. For this reason, based on the Virtual Reality (VR) technology as well as the Man-In-The-Loop design concepts, a UAV lines inspection system that uses the head-to-tracking control and the technology of the first person of view (FPV) is proposed in this paper. With the help of this system, the operator can observe the ambient environment of the UAV and obtain real-time scene with depth information simply by turning his head. By carrying out simulated experiments, the inspection system can work efficiently under the circumstance of 110kV voltage level and a distance of 1.7m from power lines. Compared with the UAV line inspection widely used at present, this system will raise the safety and efficiency of inspection operation to a higher level, and achieve the goal of reducing the number of operators from two or above to one. Based on this system, this article conceives a set of live teaching platform for power inspection. The platform will better realize remote immersive interactive teaching.