@INPROCEEDINGS{Moore_et_al_ISGT2018,
author={Andrew J. Moore and Matthew Schubert and Nicholas Rymer and Swee Balachandran and Mar{\'{\i}}a Consiglio and C{\'{e}}sar Mu{\~{n}}oz and Joshua Smith and Dexter Lewis and Paul Schneide},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE Power Energy Society Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT)},
title={Inspection of electrical transmission structures with {UAV} path conformance and lidar-based geofences},
year={2018},
number={8403395},
month={February},
address={Washington, D.C.},
abstract={To advance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, a high voltage infrastructure inspection reference mission was designed and flown. A compact airborne ultraviolet sensor to locate coronal emission “hot spots” was assessed. Two nonstandard navigation technologies were employed: polyhedral geofences derived from lidar maps, and trajectory management software to enforce standoff distance. Position was tracked with NASA's unmanned aerial system traffic management (UTM) technology. It is concluded that a) this low-altitude mission requires navigation methods that are not broadly available; b) the measurement operations and recording methods tested for the UV detector are viable; c) simplification of lidar maps to polyhedral obstacle maps reduces data volume by orders of magnitude. This enables real-time obstacle avoidance autonomy; d) onboard path conformance software successfully maneuvered the aircraft after a sudden lateral perturbation that models a gust of wind; and, e) tracking with UTM was a key safety component, since the flights were conducted beneath the landing approach to a heavily used runway.},
keywords={Air traffic control;Autonomous vehicles;Corona;Electrical fault detection1;UAV},
doi={10.1109/ISGT.2018.8403395},
}