Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have introduced benefits in many areas of the energy sector. Today, power line sensor deployment is manually executed on passive power lines using helicopters, introducing great risks, costs and difficulties for the power distribution companies and the human operators.In this paper, we present a novel modular mechanical system utilizing pneumatic as the actuation source to deploy a sensor unit to a power line using a UAV, with aid of an autonomous alignment algorithm. The results show that the UAV can facilitate the sensor unit, and is capable of deploying it to the power line in an autonomous manner. The works leave opportunity for expanding to further applications in the future.

Today, many inspection domains utilize the benefits of drones to monitor and inspect infrastructure in an efficient manner. The energy grid is challenged by frequent and thorough inspection to stay operational. So far, drones have already been introduced to solve this challenge. However, the inspection drone still requires manual control and subsequent human examination of the captured photos and videos. This inspection process comes with a high inspection cost and is susceptible to human errors in fault finding. The proposed system builds on top of the authors’ previous research to develop and verify an integrated drone system for autonomous power line inspection, enabling functioning mechanics through pneumatics, extension of operation time through energy harvesting, Artificial Intelligent (AI) fault detection, and system autonomy using navigational algorithms. An advanced drone system has been designed and manufactured for the mission, with the results demonstrating the capability to perform an autonomous inspection mission in conditions up to 30 kts wind speeds, being additionally able to detect faults in real-time at a high rate during drone motion. Furthermore, we demonstrate the ability to recharge the drone battery within 2.4 hours.

Although we aspire to make decisions based on logic and systematic analysis, it has been argued that engineers’ technical decisions can be influenced by their ideologies about progress and the future - including the material selection process. In this work, we address this potential influence through a holistic and exploratory speculative design process, asking ”what are some implications of the use of wood in high-performance drone structures, and what will a high-performance wooden drone structure look like?” A wooden prototype search and rescue drone, developed for use in Denmark, is built, tested and analyzed through quantitative and qualitative means as part of the exploration process. We find that wood offers unique features including lower toxicity during manufacturing and increased environmental sustainability. In addition, when properly designed a wooden drone structure has a significantly higher stiffness to weight ratio ($8.8 \ast10^{6}$) compared to a typical non-optimized carbon fiber and epoxy composite plate ($7.6 \ast10^{4}$) or tube ($1.1 \ast10^{6}$). Historical examples are utilized which suggest that actual material performance may be less important than the ideologies of progress surrounding the material, and hence that engineers may not always make decisions based purely on performance. Thus, here speculative design is used not only as a way to explore the material ”path less traveled”, but also as an approach to examine the legitimacy of wood as a structural drone material - and more broadly, to discuss the role ideologies play in modern engineering practice.

In recent years drones have proven their ability to solve complex tasks autonomously and effectively. Drones have not been present as a ubiquitous technology for solving these tasks yet. The reason is mainly due to their limited flying time. The technology has great market potential in many areas if flight time could be increased. However, only a few solutions for recharging are available, but none for recharging on power lines. This remains a research topic for now. Through this paper a novel energy harvesting design is presented based on inductive coupling, allowing a drone to grasp and perch onto an overhead power line to recharge its batteries. The overall electronic design was based on analyzing and simulating different current transformers in simulation before testing in the laboratory. The split-core including windings was integrated into a gripping mechanism, verified by analytical and numerical analysis as well as non-destructive and destructive testing. The results indicate that enough power can be harvested from the powerline to recharge the drone batteries. The theoretically achievable power was also found to be within the expected range. With this design, drones can solve time-consuming and complex tasks in the future.

Value sensitive design (VSD) is an approach that facilitates the pro-active incorporation of human values into technological design. The VSD literature, as well as empirical studies, identify environmental sustainability as a human value with importance in design, and therefore importance in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) design. UAS have begun to spark significant public interest and environmental changes. However, there are few studies that address how to design UAS for these changes, and none that take VSD as their point of departure. In this work, the environmental sustainability of UAS are analyzed using VSD and environmental impact potential assessment (EIPA) approaches. VSD envisioning cards are used as design prompts to identify relevant social and environmental impacts for two case studies to illustrate the approach: a healthcare application, and a powerline inspection application. The environmental impact potential is assessed, along with consideration of the drone's materials and manufacturing processes which have an effect on toxicity to humans, water depletion, and acidification. Then, general insights into how UAS can be designed for enhanced environmental sustainability are discussed. The results show high sensitivity to changes in defining the system boundaries and in defining relevant UAS scenarios, as a direct comparison of drone and non-drone scenarios is not possible. Thus, VSD and EIPA approaches can provide a nuanced way to analyze UAS applications, leading to positive social impacts and enhanced environmental sustainability in UAS in the future.