Visual navigation for power transmission line inspection robot

摘要

Power line inspection robot must plan its behavior to negotiate obstacles according to their types when it is crawling along the power transmission line.For this purpose,a visual navigation system is designed to recognize the obstacles and locate their positions by means of stereo cameras.The algorithm of visual navigation consists of two modules,obstacle recognition and obstacle locating.We propose a structure-constrained obstacle recognition algorithm to recognize obstacles,after the obstacle is recognized,a region feature based on stereo matching algorithm is used to search the correspondence points in the stereo images,and the position of the obstacle relative to the robot is calculated by 3D reconstruction.To improve the matching speed,a dynamic search window is applied.Experiments with simulation and real transmission line show that the algorithm can recognize and locate obstacles such as counterweight,strain clamp,and suspension clamp from complex background reliably.