Research on Determining the Inspection Point of Multirotor UAV Power Tower

During the inspection process of power pole towers, manual positioning is mainly used to select the shooting viewpoints of the drone, which leads to erroneous viewpoint selection and inaccurate shootings of inspected objects. Also, neglecting the effect of the sun’s backlight on photographs contributes to poor photo quality that does not meet inspection requirements. Aiming at the selection of shooting viewpoints during multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles’ inspection on power poles, this paper proposes an automatic positioning method that determines the shooting viewpoints by considering UAV performance, airborne camera parameters, and the size of objects to be measured. Considering the factors of sun illumination, we optimize the method to ensure the positions of the viewpoints and to ensure that the images can be clearly generated so that the observers can check the power pole towers through the images when shooting is also taken into consideration. Finally, the automatic calculation method of the related viewpoints is implemented in the Java language. Experiments show that the method can accurately obtain the positions of the drones’ viewpoints and reduce the number of viewpoints, which significantly improves the efficiency and quality of inspection shooting.