Environment Perception Technologies for Power Transmission Line Inspection Robots

With the fast development of the power system, traditional manual inspection methods of a power transmission line (PTL) cannot supply the demand for high quality and dependability for power grid maintenance. Consequently, the automatic PTL inspection technology becomes one of the key research focuses. For the purpose of summarizing related studies on environment perception and control technologies of PTL inspection, technologies of three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction, object detection, and visual servo of PTL inspection are reviewed, respectively. Firstly, 3D reconstruction of PTL inspection is reviewed and analyzed, especially for the technology of LiDAR-based reconstruction of power lines. Secondly, the technology of typical object detection, including pylons, insulators, and power line accessories, is classified as traditional and deep learning-based methods. After that, their merits and demerits are considered. Thirdly, the progress and issues of visual servo control of inspection robots are also concisely addressed. For improving the automation degree of PTL robots, current problems of key techniques, such as multisensor fusion and the establishment of datasets, are discussed and the prospect of inspection robots is presented.