PFI-TT: Intelligent Flight Planning of Multiple Drones for Power Line Inspection

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project is to enable automated and simultaneous inspection by multiple drones. Potential customers include electric utility companies, public safety organizations, and drone operators. The benefits of efficient drone-based inspection of electric power lines include greater safety for linemen, cost savings for maintenance inspections (e.g., to detect vegetation near power lines), and substantial time savings. The ability to utilize multiple drones to reduce the inspection time can be critical when assessing damage and recovering from outages due to storms and hurricanes. The advantage of using a team of drones is that multiple power lines can be simultaneously inspected, thus parallelizing the inspection process and substantially reducing the mission time for the human operators. The team will partner with drone operators and electric utilities to perform a proof-of-concept distribution line inspection and to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach. There is also potential for applying the proposed software to the transportation and energy industries for inspection of highways, railroads, and oil and gas pipelines. The project team will work with the technology commercialization arm of the university and will discover additional potential partners.The proposed project will develop, implement, and validate flight planning algorithms and software for a team of drones to efficiently inspect power lines. Given the geographic locations of the power transmission and distribution lines, and the number and model of the drones, the drone routing algorithms will automatically generate flight plans for each of the drones from their home locations. A key research challenge that will be addressed is the development of efficient algorithms capable of scaling up to handle dense power line networks over large areas. The ability to automatically assign and coordinate multiple drones, with battery constraints and potentially even of different types, to different sections of the power lines in a resource-optimal manner will be a significant advance over the current state of the art in both manual and drone based inspection. To enable ease of use for commercialization, the software will run in the cloud, enabling workers in the field to obtain automatically generated flight plans from their smartphones.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.