ROUTING ALGORITHM AND COST ANALYSIS FOR USING HYDROGEN FUEL CELL POWERED UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE IN HIGH VOLTAGE TRANSMISSION LINE INSPECTION

摘要

With the rapid development of robotics technology, robots are increasingly used to conduct various tasks by utility companies. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is one of the efficient robots that can be used to implement high voltage transmission line inspection. One bottleneck of the existing UAV technologies used in transmission line inspection is the limited capacity of the lithium battery. The practitioners need to land the UAVs and replace the lithium battery frequently to complete a certain range of inspection. In this paper, the team explores the feasibility of using hydrogen fuel cell as the power to support UAV in transmission line inspection. A routing algorithm is proposed to guide the motion of the ground team and the schedule of the landing points of the UAV. The cost is analyzed and compared to the scenario that traditional lithium battery is used. A case study is implemented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed routing algorithm and examine the performance in terms of cost effectiveness.