Autonomous Patrol Technology and System on Leapfrog-Type Charging UAV - Automatic Charging Control based on Machine Vision

Rotor-craft unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been applied rapidly in the domestic electric power system. However, endurance time of the drone loaded with equipment is limited in 20 minutes. Therefore, this paper proposes a key technology of automatic leapfrog-type charging control based on machine vision. Leapfrog-type charging platform is composed of UAV platform, UAV automatic charging platform and ground control system. According to both flight control and intelligent control, with the aid of machine vision and image recognition technology on positioning and intelligent landing UAV with high precision, and effective docking of preset slots and charging interfaces between ground charging platform and UAV, the battery of UAV charges automatically reliably, so as to realize the take-off and landing and automatically recharging UAV. The experimental results show that the problem of high precision positioning in charging process of UAV is effectively solved by implementing the leapfrog charging platform, machine vision, image recognition and shutdown technology.