AUTHOR=Yao Yao , Jun-hua Cao , Yi Guo , Zhun Fan , An-Min Zou , Biao Xu , Ke Li 

TITLE=Autonomous Control Method of Rotor UAVs for Power Inspection With Renewable Energy Based on Swarm Intelligence

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Energy Research

VOLUME=Volume 9 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/energy-research/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.697054

DOI=10.3389/fenrg.2021.697054

ISSN=2296-598X

ABSTRACT=With the rapid development of renewable energy, the scale of China's power grid with renewable energy become much bigger than ever so that the inspection and maintenance work of the power grid with renewable energy is facing more severe challenges. Aiming at the shortcomings of the traditional manual inspection methods, this paper studies and proposes an optimization algorithm of automatic inspection of UAVs to improve the efficiency and cost of the inspection and maintenance work of the power grid with renewable energy. Firstly, the communication network of swarm intelligence system is established to transmit the local information sensed by each UAV in real time.Secondly, according to the sensing ability of UAVs, the segmentation model of UAVs overlapping sensing areas is established, which effectively reduces the probability of overlapping UAVs sensing areas. Thirdly, according to the difference between the coverage value and the effective coverage index of each point in the sensing area, the optimization function of coverage index is given, which makes the UAV give priority to inspection the area with lower coverage value. Finally, when an UAV completes the a local coverage task, the traction speed is introduced to prevent the UAV from stopping, which ensures that the inspection task of the whole area can be completed in a limited time. The numerical simulation results show that the algorithm can effectively control the UAVs to complete the inspection task in the specified area, and compared with the single UAV inspection method, this algorithm can greatly improve the inspection efficiency and reduce the inspection cost.