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.

A large percentage of current overhead power transmission infrastructure is becoming aged, raising the demand for frequent grid inspections in an efficient, and cost-effect manner in order to keep it functional. Autonomous drones are a promising solution for infrastructure inspection, but require further investigation and development to be a viable alternative. This paper proposes a drone framework based on open-source platforms for autonomous inspection of electrical grid infrastructure and for cable grasping. The framework incorporates a cloud service functionality to provide geo-location data of nearby power pylons; a localisation system for navigation near power pylons and grasping cables; and algorithms for finding and planning paths for navigation and grasping over cables. The proposed framework has been tested and validated in simulation, with the development of a UAV platform for future integration.