Path Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

A flight inspection system comprising:

• a memory for storing machine-readable instructions;
• and
• a processor core for accessing the machine-readable instructions and executing the machine-readable instructions as operations, the operations comprising:
• causing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to travel a predetermined flight path to a region of interest including an estimated location of electrical infrastructure;
• receiving initial sensor data from the UAV of the region of interest;
• determining an actual location of the electrical infrastructure based on the initial sensor data;
• identifying an electrical infrastructure type of the electrical infrastructure based on the initial sensor data;
• identifying a set of desired images based on the actual location, the electrical infrastructure type, and image parameters that define an image framing of the electrical infrastructure;
• generating an inspection flight path toward the actual location of the electrical infrastructure to capture the set of desired images;
• and
• causing the UAV to obtain a set of captured images of the electrical infrastructure corresponding to the set of desired images, captured images of the set of captured images having the image framing of the electrical infrastructure.

A path planning method comprising:

• causing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to travel a predetermined flight path to a region of interest including an estimated location of electrical infrastructure based on location data of the electrical infrastructure;
• receiving initial sensor data from the UAV of the region of interest;
• determining an actual location of the electrical infrastructure based on the initial sensor data;
• identifying an electrical infrastructure type of the electrical infrastructure based on the initial sensor data;
• generating a set of desired images based on the actual location, the electrical infrastructure type, and image parameters that define an image framing of the electrical infrastructure;
• generating an inspection flight path toward the actual location of the electrical infrastructure to capture the set of desired images, wherein generating the inspection flight path includes verifying the estimated location is the actual location or calculating an adjusted distance between the estimated location and the actual location;
• and
• updating the location data in response to the adjusted distance being calculated.