Abstract—The emerging technology of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has become more affordable and practicable for power line inspections. In this paper, we propose a multi-platform UAV system and multi-model communication system for highly efficient power line inspection tasks in China. The different UAVs cooperatively serve as long-distance imaging, short dis-tance imaging and communication relay. The high quality im-age/video is transmitted in realtime to the on-site control station for UAV navigation and far end office for analysis. Our experi-ence shows that the cooperative inspection for multi-UAVs can achieve a much higher efficiency than traditional inspection methods.

Index Terms—UAV, hexrotor, fixed wing, tethered rotor, pow-er line inspection, communication relay, datalink

Cite: Chuang Deng, Shengwei Wang, Zhi Huang, Zhongfu Tan, and Junyong Liu, "Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Power Line Inspection: A Cooperative Way in Platforms and Communications," Journal of Communications, vol. 9, no. 9, pp. 687-692, 2014. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.9.9.687-692