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

PFI-TT：电力线路巡检多无人机智能飞行规划

基本信息

批准号：
1919233
负责人：
Srinivas Akella
金额：
$ 25万
依托单位：
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2019
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2019-08-01 至 2023-07-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1919233&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
PFI TT Intelligent Flight Planning

项目摘要

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.

这种创新合作伙伴关系的更广泛的影响/商业潜力 - 技术翻译（PFI -TT）项目是通过多个无人机来实现自动化和同时检查。潜在客户包括电力公司，公共安全组织和无人机运营商。对电力线的有效检查的好处包括对巡线员的更大安全性，节省维护检查的成本（例如，在电力线附近检测植被）以及节省大量时间。在评估损害和因暴风雨和飓风而从中断中恢复时，利用多个无人机来减少检查时间的能力可能是至关重要的。使用无人机团队的优点是可以同时检查多个电源线，从而使检查过程并行，并大大减少了人类操作员的任务时间。该团队将与无人机操作员和电力公司合作，进行概念验证分配线检查并评估该方法的有效性。还有可能将拟议的软件应用于运输和能源行业，以检查高速公路，铁路以及石油和天然气管道。项目团队将与大学的技术商业化部门合作，并发现其他潜在的合作伙伴。拟议的项目将为一组无人机制定，实施和验证飞行计划算法和软件，以有效地检查电源线。鉴于电力传输和配电线的地理位置以及无人机的数量和模型，无人机路由算法将自动从其家中为每个无人机生成飞行计划。将要解决的一个关键研究挑战是开发有效的算法，能够扩大扩展以处理大面积的密集电力线网络。自动分配和协调多个无人机，电池限制（甚至可能具有不同类型的电池限制）的能力，以资源 - 最佳方式的不同部分，将在手动和基于无人机的检查中以当前的目前状态相比，这将是一个重大的进步。为了易于商业化，该软件将在云中运行，从而使该领域的工人能够从其智能手机中自动生成飞行计划。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响标准通过评估的法定任务。