Vehicle Fault-Tolerant Robust Power Transmission Line Inspection Planning

TL;DR

This paper presents a fault-tolerant, robust planning method for autonomous multi-copter inspection of power lines, optimizing routes to handle vehicle failures and battery constraints through re-planning strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel inspection planning framework that incorporates fault-tolerance and re-planning for autonomous vehicles in power line inspection tasks.

Findings

Effective re-planning increases inspection success rate.

Metaheuristic algorithm reduces computation time.

Robust cost functions improve fault-tolerance.

Abstract

This paper concerns fault-tolerant power transmission line inspection planning as a generalization of the multiple traveling salesmen problem. The addressed inspection planning problem is formulated as a single-depot multiple-vehicle scenario, where the inspection vehicles are constrained by the battery budget limiting their inspection time. The inspection vehicle is assumed to be an autonomous multi-copter with a wide range of possible flight speeds influencing battery consumption. The inspection plan is represented by multiple routes for vehicles providing full coverage over inspection target power lines. On an inspection vehicle mission interruption, which might happen at any time during the execution of the inspection plan, the inspection is re-planned using the remaining vehicles and their remaining battery budgets. Robustness is introduced by choosing a suitable cost function for the initial plan that maximizes the time window for successful re-planning. It enables the remaining vehicles to successfully finish all the inspection targets using their respective remaining battery budgets. A combinatorial metaheuristic algorithm with various cost functions is used for planning and fast re-planning during the inspection.