Automatic UAV-Based Inspection of Overhead Lines and Substations: beyond visible spectrum

Recent technological development, decreasing costs coupled with an increasing availability of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have made UAV-based condition monitoring and diagnosis of power equipment attractive. Traditional labor-intensive manual interventions have been steadily replaced by solutions where the level of automation is gradually increasing. At the same time, a tendency to scale up inspection missions to cover entire overhead line segments, as opposed to spot investigations, has been emerging. Along this line of trends, a system addressing power line monitoring with a focus on revealing faults invisible to the naked eye is presented in this work. In order to meet safety constraints and at the same time cover a certain distance to be financially appealing (typically around 100 km per day), flight missions are recommended to keep at least 15-20 meters from the infrastructure and at the same time be executed at a velocity of at least 5 m/s. Under these challenging dynamic conditions, research project VOLTAIR relies on commercial ultraviolet and infrared imaging devices while aiming at a drastic reduction of time-consuming on-site visits through the use of UAVs and automatic data analysis.