Aerial Device Delivery for Power Line Inspection and Maintenance

The inspection and maintenance of power lines with aerial robots requires to decrease as much as possible the performance time given the limited capacity of the batteries and the vast extension of this kind of infrastructure. In order to avoid the waste of time associated to the take-off and landing maneuvers, this paper proposes the use of aerial manipulation robots for fast and safe delivery in flight of devices and tools. Two use cases are considered. In the first one, a device delivery multirotor (DDM) is used as supplier for a device installation robot (DIR), consisting of a dual arm aerial manipulator in long reach configuration. The vertical separation distance between DIR and DDM associated to the long reach link contributes to reduce the risk of collision and the downwash effect over the DDM. In the second case, the DIR is used to deliver tools to human operators quickly and safely, avoiding hazardous situations during the handover thanks to the long reach configuration. The paper also analyzes the aerodynamic downwash effect of two multirotors flying vertically at distances determined by the long reach link through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation. Experimental results in an indoor testbed validate the proposed application.