Efficient unmanned aerial vehicle paths design for post-disaster damage assessment of overhead transmission lines

The widespread distribution of overhead transmission lines increases the vulnerability of power grids to failures. Thus, power lines need to be timely inspected, especially before or during emergency-related situations to ensure stable operation of the power grid. Traditional methods of visual inspection (satellites and helicopters) are inconvenient, often cannot be deployed and if they are deployed present a slow response time and high cost, which is very critical for fast post-disaster damage identification. On the other hand, employing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) offers a more efficient, reliable, and faster means for the assessment process. This article proposes a novel approach for the post-disaster UAV-based damage assessment of overhead power lines. In the proposed approach, the UAVs paths over the most critical loads are formulated as an optimisation problem with the objective of minimising the total inspection time while considering the recharging of the UAVs' batteries. To solve the problem, an efficient framework that optimises the UAVs flight paths is proposed to inspect the critical loads in an efficient order, while accounting for the UAV recharging. This guarantees that the UAVs complete the assessment tasks unlike existing benchmarks.