Design of electrical control system for transmission line inspection unmanned aerial vehicle based on multi-sensor fusion and optical sensing

Abstract

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in power line inspection. However, they encounter problems such as positioning drift, attitude instability and defect omission detection in complex electromagnetic environments. To address these challenges, this paper designs a multi-sensor fusion electrical control system tailored for a UAV-based optoelectronic inspection platform, which integrates optical payloads such as visible light cameras, infrared thermal imagers, and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). The system adopts a heterogeneous dual-core architecture, with STM32H743 as the flight control core, combined with an embedded AI processing module, to build a six-source sensing hardware platform. The platform enables synchronized acquisition and fusion of high-resolution optical images, thermal radiation data, and three-dimensional point cloud information. Through an adaptive federated Kalman filtering framework, it achieves tight coupling positioning of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)/ Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)/millimeter-wave radar, and introduces a time-spatial alignment algorithm to compensate for the asynchronous delay of multi-source sensing, achieving integrated control of high-precision positioning and multi-target recognition. Laboratory calibration, semi-physical simulation and field measurement verification show that the system effectively supports high-quality optical data collection under various weather and lighting conditions. The system's horizontal positioning root mean square error is 0.124m, 0.1°level attitude control, hovering stability is better than ±0.05m, and the comprehensive defect identification accuracy rate reaches 98.7% (sample size 1200 groups). It can work stably in the ±800kV ultra-high voltage electromagnetic environment, with endurance and wind resistance performance meeting the requirements of complex inspection scenarios such as mountainous areas, cross-river and forest areas