Drone-based power-line tracking system

In recent years, a study of power-line inspection using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been actively conducted. However, relevant studies have been conducting power-line inspection with an UAV operated by manual control, and they have developed just power-line detection algorithm on aerial images. To overcome limitations of existing research, we propose a drone-based power-line tracking system in this paper. The main contributions of this paper are to operate developed system under configured environment and to develop a power-line detection algorithm in real-time. Developed system is composed of the power-line detection and the image-based tracking control. To detect a power-line in real-time, a region of interest (ROI) image is extracted. Furthermore, clustering algorithm is used in order to discriminate the power-line from background. Finally, the power-line is detected by using the Hough transform, and a center position and a tilt angle are estimated by using the Kalman filter to control a drone smoothly. We design a position controller and an attitude controller for image-based tracking control, and both controllers are designed based on the proportional-derivative (PD) control method. The interaction between the position controller and the attitude controller makes the drone track the power-line. Several experiments were carried out in environments where conditions are similar to actual environments, which demonstrates the superiority of the developed system.