Real-Time Environmental Cognition and Sag Estimation of Transmission Lines Using UAV Equipped With 3-D Lidar System

Transmission lines (TLs) are prone to frequent failures owing to their exposure to extreme environments. It is essential to monitor these failures and repair the TLs on time; moreover, their health must be accurately estimated to ensure reliability and safety. Therefore, this study proposes an intel...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on power delivery 2021-10, Vol.36 (5), p.2658-2667
Main Authors: Jeong, Siheon, Kim, Donggeun, Kim, San, Ham, Ji-Wan, Lee, Jae-Kyung, Oh, Ki-Yong
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Coordinate transformations
Estimation
Extreme environments
Field tests
Inspection
Intelligent inspection
Laser radar
Lidar
light detection and ranging
Monitoring
Real time
Real-time systems
Sag
transmission line
Transmission lines
unmanned aerial vehicle
Unmanned aerial vehicles
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Summary:Transmission lines (TLs) are prone to frequent failures owing to their exposure to extreme environments. It is essential to monitor these failures and repair the TLs on time; moreover, their health must be accurately estimated to ensure reliability and safety. Therefore, this study proposes an intelligent monitoring method with novel sensors deployed on a UAV. Specifically, this paper presents a method to not only cognize TLs and their environments in real time but also estimate the sag by combining the measured point-cloud data from a Lidar with the flight information of a UAV. Environmental cognition in real time addresses coordinate transformation and probabilistic downsampling for voxelized mapping, thus ensuring limited hardware requirement. A robust random-sample consensus is introduced to effectively extract point-cloud data for TLs, thereby accurately estimating the sag. Field tests confirmed the accuracy of the proposed method and demonstrated the effectiveness and advantages of the smart environmental cognition system. One flight was sufficient for estimating the sag on both sides of the TLs, demonstrating the economic feasibility of the proposed method. Considering the inherent advantages of the diagnostics and prognostics of a UAV, the proposed method has potential applications in the reliable operation and proactive maintenance of TLs.
ISSN:0885-8977
1937-4208
DOI:10.1109/TPWRD.2020.3024965