abstract
- The authors are grateful to the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, Portugal) for financial support through national funds FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC) to CeDRI (UIDB/05757/2020 and UIDP/05757/2020), SusTEC (LA/P/0007/2021), Oleachain ”Skills for sustainability and innovation in the value chain of traditional olive groves in the Northern Interior of Portugal” (Norte06-3559-FSE-000188) and Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica Celso Suckow da Fonseca (CEFET/RJ). The project that gave rise to these results received the support of a fellowship from ”la Caixa” Foundation (ID 100010434). The fellowship code is LCF/BQ/DI20/11780028.
- This research proposes positioning obstacle detection sensors by multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) dedicated to detailed inspections in high voltage towers. Different obstacle detection sensors are analyzed to compose a multisensory architecture in a multirotor UAV. The representation of the beam pattern of the sensors is modeled in the CoppeliaSim simulator to analyze the sensors’ coverage and detection performance in simulation. A multirotor UAV is designed to carry the same sensor architecture modeled in the simulation. The aircraft is used to perform flights over a deactivated electrical tower, aiming to evaluate the detection performance of the sensory architecture embedded in the aircraft. The results obtained in the simulation were compared with those obtained in a real scenario of electrical inspections. The proposed method achieved its goals as a mechanism to early evaluate the detection capability of different previously characterized sensor architectures used in multirotor UAV for electrical inspections.