Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Power Line Inspection: A Cooperative Way in Platforms and Communications

The emerging technology of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has become more affordable and practicable for power line inspections. In this paper, we propose a multi-platform UAV system and multi-model communication system for highly efficient power line inspection tasks in China. The different UAVs cooperatively serve as long-distance imaging, short dis- tance imaging and communication relay. The high quality im- age/video is transmitted in realtime to the on-site control station for UAV navigation and far end office for analysis. Our experi- ence shows that the cooperative inspection for multi-UAVs can achieve a much higher efficiency than traditional inspection methods.  Index Terms—UAV, hexrotor, fixed wing, tethered rotor, pow- er line inspection, communication relay, datalink