UAV patrol path planning based on machine vision and multi-sensor fusion

Abstract With the rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, there are more and more fields of UAV application. This research mainly discusses the UAV patrol path planning based on machine vision and multi-sensor fusion. This article studies how to apply ultrasonic, a classic ranging sensor, to obstacle avoidance of UAVs. The designed ultrasonic obstacle avoidance system is a complete set of hardware and software systems. The hardware part consists of a forward ultrasonic module and a central signal processing module. Among them, a single-axis stabilization gimbal is designed for the forward ultrasonic module, which decouples the attitude angle of the UAV and the pitch detection angle of the ultrasonic sensor. In the central signal processing module, Kalman filtering is performed on the ultrasonic data in the four directions of front, rear, left, right, and left, and the obstacle avoidance control signal is sent to the flight controller according to the filtered sensor data. At the same time, a human–computer interaction interface is also designed to set various parameters of the obstacle avoidance system. For the route planning method of the tower, the routine steps are used to inspect the tower with a single-circuit line, and the specific targets are the insulator string, the ground wire, and the conductor. In this study, the average statistical result of the straight-line distance of the UAV patrolling 100 m is 99.80 m, and the error is only 0.2%. The fusion obstacle avoidance control method based on machine vision is suitable for the engineering application of UAV perception obstacle avoidance. The obstacle avoidance method adopted in this article can be extended to most flight control platforms, and it is a control method with broad application prospects.