
Several methods have been employed to detect and analyze these anomalies. The primary damages in transmission lines could be broken cables, damage to insulators, conductor corrosion and vibration damage some of these defects are shown in Figure 1. Generally, the electrical equipment undergoes a maintenance and repair process, based on their condition, which is termed as preventive maintenance. Constant surveillance and inspection of power lines can play a vital role to avoid power shortage: detection of defects in power equipment at an early stage can prevent severe and costly damage, and even used to expect future anomalies. Power transmission lines are the means of electricity distribution, and it is of extreme importance to ensure the continuous supply of electricity and the high performance of these lines. We demonstrate our approach on data captured by a drone in Parma, Italy.

Infrared imaging, which is invariant to large scale and illumination changes in the real operating environment, supported the identification of faults in power transmission lines while a neural network is adapted and trained to detect and classify insulators from an optical video stream. We used state-of-the-art computer vision methods to highlight expected faults (i.e., hot spots) or damaged components of the electrical infrastructure (i.e., damaged insulators).

In this work, a drone, equipped with multi-modal sensors, captures images in the visible and infrared domain and transmits them to the ground station. To achieve these objectives, recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in fact, they provide a safe way to bring sensors close to the power transmission lines and their associated components without halting the equipment during the inspection, and reducing operational cost and risk. Most importantly, the assessment of damaged aerial power lines and rusted conductors is of extreme importance for public safety hence, power lines and associated components must be periodically inspected to ensure a continuous supply and to identify any fault and defect. These might be lab samples, blood, medications, anything that has a short shelf life and needs to travel between facilities for one reason or another.The power transmission lines are the link between power plants and the points of consumption, through substations. That package, in the case of this first installation, will be a temperature-sensitive hardshell case with numerous vials inside that would normally be transferred overland. The unusual shape serves a purpose, however, providing a safe place for a cargo drone to land and swap its battery out, protected from the elements and the type of ne'er-do-wells who would snatch a medical payload from an innocent robot. In this case it's dead on, looking for anything like a prop from a '60s sci-fi flick. The Station was teased early last year, but one never knows with these concept renders whether the final result will be anything like the idea. Matternet's Station, an automated landing space and payload control tower, may be the solution, and the flower-like structure has finally made the jump from render to reality at a medical facility in Switzerland.

No one knows exactly how drone delivery will fit into the future of logistics, but one thing is for sure: The aircraft aren't going to drop off important payloads directly onto someone's lawn.
