ICARUS: Automatic Autonomous Power Infrastructure Inspection with UAVs

Power transmission and distribution networks mostly span across harsh environments and thus, frequent faults and failures are observed, increasing the maintenance costs, pressing the authorities to provide electricity continuously and uninterruptedly. To this end, thorough field inspections with skilled personnel are regularly conducted, which are labor-intensive, costly and slow, whereby efficiency and staff safety cannot be always ensured. UAVs stem as a promising solution for power infrastructure inspection; however, their use is mostly limited by the fact that a remote pilot is in control of flight and mission processes, rendering reliable data acquisition in short time interval a tedious task. Despite research efforts for automating inspection procedures, these have not been widely adopted. In this study, we address this challenge by developing a Power Distribution Network Inspection Platform Using UAVs (ICARUS), based on a vision-based artificial intelligence toolkit, that integrates multiple sensors and automates many tasks, such as detection, tracking and identification of infrastructure components, gathering reliable spatial/time data associated to these components autonomously, safely and fast.