Continuous Monitoring of Transmission Lines by a Swarm of Multicopters

Overhead transmission line monitoring and inspection to date is largely done by human examination. This is inefficient, costly and time consuming. This paper considers enabling a swarm of multicopters to continuously monitor the power network with the consideration of 1) the flight time and charging requirements of the swarm which is used to inform 2) the dynamic distribution of a swarm to autonomously survey the power network. To tackle these challenges we formulate a network time management and energy optimization problem to minimize the overall network monitoring time and introduce a line graph advection protocol to autonomously distribute the multicopters across the power network. The approach is simulated on the Australia’s east coast transmission line network to demonstrate the results