Position and orientation system for overhead power-line inspection using multi-sensor integrated unmanned aerial vehicles

To overcome the low efficiency of traditional manual power-line inspection, automated unmanned aerial vehicles are applied in many power-line inspection works. In order to improve the quality of multi-sensor payload data acquisition, a suitable UAV fiber-optic gyroscope (FOG) position and orientation (POS) system is designed by analyzing the influences of motion errors on the imaging quality of different imaging payloads based on the characteristics of power line inspection work and the integrated multi-sensor payload's dependence on position and attitude information. The POS system realizes the real-time acquisition and afterward process of the required data. The measured data indicate that the heading angle accuracy is 4'12″ (σ), the attitude accuracy is 28.8″ (σ), the positioning accuracy is 3-5 m (σ), and the speed accuracy is 0.05 m/s (σ).