Vision-Based Autonomous Landing of a Hybrid Robot on a Powerline

In recent years, various types of inspection robots have been developed to automate powerline inspection. The hybrid robot combines the advantages of climbing and flying robots and has a promising prospect in powerline inspection. But landing a hybrid robot on the target powerline among multiple ones is challenging. Flights require robust detection of powerlines and stable tracking of the target powerline. We propose a complete solution for the autonomous landing of a hybrid robot on a powerline. First, a special feature extraction operator and the corresponding density-based feature recognition algorithm are designed to detect multiscale powerlines. Second, a binocular vision-based depth estimation method for the landing point in the powerline is described. Third, two spatio-temporal dictionaries are established to track the target one in multiple powerlines. Meanwhile, landing strategies and control methods are presented to achieve a stable landing task. Finally, a hybrid robot is designed to validate the proposed method. The experiment results demonstrate the accuracy of the powerline detection and depth estimation algorithm, as well as the effectiveness of the robot in tracking and landing tasks.