Samsun University is developing an autonomous, artificial intelligence-powered drone to detect cable faults, leaning poles and damaged insulators, funded with 3 million Turkish lira from TÜBİTAK. The project aims to reduce maintenance teams’ exposure to risks and speed up fault-location efforts, with plans to use it after disasters.
Turkey’s Samsun University is developing an autonomous aerial drone to inspect electricity transmission lines in rugged areas as part of a project supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK), with a budget of 3 million Turkish lira. The project is led by Associate Professor Muammer Türk Oğlu, head of the Department of Software Engineering in the university’s Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences.
The system is designed to fly autonomously alongside power lines and then use artificial intelligence models to detect cable tears and breaks, monitor the inclination of electricity poles, and identify potential breaks and cracks in insulators. The drone sends the inspection results to a central dashboard so that technicians can receive alerts about locations requiring intervention.
Automated Inspection Instead of Checking the Entire Line
In many cases, power lines extend over long distances through mountainous or hard-to-reach areas, which may keep maintenance teams in the field for extended periods and expose them to the risks of working at heights. According to Türk Oğlu, the system aims to identify the location of damage in advance, allowing teams to go directly to the damaged point instead of inspecting the entire route.
Three-dimensional designs for the drone are currently being prepared, while images and video footage captured from power lines are being labeled for use in training the artificial intelligence model. The first part of the project, which lasts six months, focuses on hardware, communications and software, with field tests set to begin after the drone’s development is completed. The project’s total duration is 18 months.
Potential Uses After Earthquakes and Floods
The project’s scope has been expanded to include responses to infrastructure damage after disasters, particularly earthquakes and floods. After a disaster, the drone can be deployed to identify damage to cables, poles and insulators, including poles that have been displaced by earthquakes, while transmitting the information immediately to the monitoring center.
Türk Oğlu connects the project’s concept to his personal experience with the risks of working in the electricity sector. He noted that his father worked for years repairing power lines, installing new lines and performing tasks related to transformers, and was exposed to the risks of working on poles and in remote areas.
What Changes in Practice?
If the tests are successful, the project’s practical value will lie in transforming line inspection from a broad field task into an automated survey process that sets priorities for technicians. This could help reduce the time needed to reach faults and the risk of worker injuries. However, the article does not yet present field-test results or model-accuracy indicators, so the system’s operational performance cannot be evaluated at this stage.
The team describes the project as locally developed, while acknowledging that some of the drone’s components are imported from abroad. One of the subsequent plans is to replace these components with local alternatives as the work progresses.