UAV Lidar System Helps Monitor Interferences of Vegetation with Powerlines

Vegetation around poses a great threat to the overhead power transmission lines. The wildfires recently reported in California and Southern Australia started from interference between a branch and the power line. Strong winds in those cases were the trigger for the event initially and the cause of the uncontrolled spread of fire later. To avoid these events, technicians are routinely engaged in difficult and often ineffective operations by off-road vehicles, helicopters, or on foot. Today, Lidar payloads installed on drones can effectively provide a model of the vegetation and other potential sources of interferences, allowing for predictive models of the risk.

The project

Drone Solutions, a professional service provider based in Greece, performed a powerline corridor survey of 20 km of infrastructure for the local electric utility. Dielmo3D, a leading Lidar processing company based in Spain, processed the data with proprietary algorithms.

Purpose

The Lidar survey of the area was performed to create a model of the vegetation. Trees were segmented and modelled, along with all other potential sources of interference with the infrastructure.

Results

The point cloud classification and the implementation of predictive algorithms for the growth of the trees allowed for the output of comprehensive safety analysis of the network, customized according to the safe distances thresholds provided by the client.

The Scanfly advantages

The process validated the effectiveness of using UAV with Lidar technologies to monitor over time the interferences of vegetation with powerlines. Scanfly Lite has proven to be able to provide accurate data for this activity in large and difficult access areas. In morphologically more complex situations, for the survey of high voltage power lines, Scanfly Ultra is the recommended solution, thanks to the greater range and resolution.