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UAV Vision-Based Nonlinear Formation Control Applied to Inspection of Electrical Power Lines

Cooperation of humans workers and a team of UAV co-workers for inspection and maintenance of electrical power is the main motivation of research presented in this paper. Collaborative human-UAV works at height are beneficial from several reasons including providing images from the ideal point of view, monitoring of the safety of individual workers, and even aerial delivering of required tools. These tasks also involve cognitive capabilities in the monitoring of the workers and the detection of unsafe behaviors, transportation of tools or parts needed by the workers and collective manipulation with the workers. In general, interaction of humans and teams of UAVs becomes an important task as aerial robots are widely spread in various applications that require the presence of people in their workspace. To achieve such interaction, group control of multiple UAVs must take states of workers (e.g. position relative to aerial co-workers and prediction of worker’s future behavior), maintaining an adaptable formation and maximizing the observation of the worker. Thus, we propose in this work, a distributed vision-based nonlinear formation control (DVNFC) approach that results in an adaptable formation where the controller minimizes the error in observation always maintaining the visualization of the human by the whole formation. We performed several numerical simulations using ROS/Gazebo with real-time visual feedback to validate our approach.