3D Autonomous Tracking of Buried Pipelines via a UAV in a Low Altitude

This paper presents a novel 3D tracking mechanism for buried oil and gas pipelines based on the tracking structure which is identified via the depth image captured by the stereo camera. Because of the geological specialty of United Arab Emirates that oil and gas pipelines are buried shallowly, then pipelines can be considered as berms visually. Through linear fitting of the nearest pixels of the depth image, the pipeline berm can be identified. Then according to the orientation and lateral difference information of the pipeline obtained, the UAV autonomous navigation and tracking can be realized. Besides, the navigation methods and variant PID controller designed previously are continuously applied in this research. Overall experiment results show this 3D autonomous tracking of the pipeline is stable, accurate and effective.