Cooperative Transmission Tower Inspection with a Vehicle and a UAV in Urban Areas

To reduce the workload of inspectors and improve the inspection efficiency of urban transmission towers, a new inspection method is proposed in this paper, in which an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and vehicle cooperate with each other. We investigate the cooperative path planning problem of a UAV and a vehicle for transmission tower inspection and develop a new 0–1 integer programming model to address the problem. An odd-even layered genetic algorithm (O-ELGA) is proposed to efficiently solve the model. Finally, the effectiveness of the algorithm is further verified by simulation experiments.