Proposal of an Augmented Reality Tag UAV Positioning System for Power Line Tower Inspection.

Autonomous inspection Unmanned Aerial Vehicle systems are an essential research area, including power line distribution inspection. Considerable efforts to solve the demanding presented in the autonomous UAV inspection process are present in technical and scientific research. One of these challenges is the precise positioning and fly control of the UAV around the energy structures, which is vital to assure the security of the operation. The most common techniques to achieve precise positioning in UAV fly are Global Positioning Systems with Real-Time Kinematic. This technique demands a proper satellite signal receiving to work appropriately, sometimes hard to achieve. The present work proposes a complementary position data system based on augmented reality tags (AR Tags) to increase the reliability of the UAV fly positioning system. The system application is proposed for energy power tower inspections as an example of use. The adaptation to other inspection tasks is possible whit some small changes. Experimental results have shown that an increase in the position accuracy is accomplished with the use of this schema.