Vision-Based Multi-Wire Detection and Tracking for UAV Wire Approach - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University
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MSR Thesis Defense

November

25
Tue
Tyler Harp MSR Student Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University
Tuesday, November 25
2:00 pm to 3:00 pm
Newell-Simon Hall 4305
Vision-Based Multi-Wire Detection and Tracking for UAV Wire Approach
Abstract: 
Reliable detection and tracking of power lines is critical for enabling under-wire UAV approach and inductive power-line charging to extend UAV range. However, wires are thin, featureless, and visually ambiguous structures that challenge traditional computer vision methods and degrade depth estimation accuracy. To address these challenges, this thesis presents a fully passive, camera-only multi-wire detection and tracking algorithm that operates in real time on lightweight onboard compute using only stereo RGB imagery.

The proposed framework integrates a lightweight classical vision pipeline with three-dimensional geometric reasoning and a multi-stage filtering process to produce robust wire instance detections. A complementary oriented object detection model is trained using labels generated by the classical pipeline, leveraging its fine-tuned geometric outputs to improve resilience in challenging visual conditions. To track individual wire instances across frames, we introduce a Kalman-filter-based tracking architecture that estimates both wire orientation and per-wire positional state while remaining robust to wire detection outliers and vehicle pose drift. The system is further expanded by testing a wire positional servoing approach using the tracked wire instances in simulation and is validated across a diverse range of data sources, including simulation, indoor testing, handheld experiments, and outdoor flight evaluations.

Committee:
Sebastian Scherer (advisor)
Wennie Tabib
Mohammad Mousaei