Visual navigation for a power transmission line inspection robot

Inspection robot must plan its behavior to negotiate obstacles according to their types when it is crawling along the power transmission line. For this purpose, a visual navigation system is designed to recognize the obstacles and locate their positions by stereovision. We propose a structure-constrained obstacle recognition algorithm based on improved circle detection methods to recognize obstacles from complex background robustly. After the obstacle is recognized, a region based stereo matching algorithm is used to search the correspondence points in the stereo images, and the position of the obstacle relative to the robot is calculated by 3D reconstruction. Experiments with simulation and real transmission line show its effectiveness.