UAV-based powerline inspection

Abstract

Powerline inspections have always been a challenge due to its cost and safety issues. As a result, it has been crucial to create new methods/mechanisms for inspecting the powerlines. Moreover, existing solutions typically highlighted the inspection of only one of the components of a powerline at a time. Therefore, in this capstone design project we design and develop a powerline inspecting drone that can inspect multiple components of the powerline. This report discusses mainly the hardware and software architectures of the aforementioned drone-based inspection system. In the process, our choices of the different building blocks that make up the proposed design are thoroughly discussed and justified while delineating the main challenges encountered during the process of building our drone-based system.