Helicopter-borne laser autonomous positioning of buried pipeline

To realize the remote detection of the leak of a buried natural gas pipeline by an airborne laser, a helicopter-borne laser autonomous positioning method for the buried natural gas pipeline was presented. Based on the position and attitude of the carrier aircraft obtained by an airborne GPS and an inertial attitude measurement system, the laser autonomous positioning point of the pipeline was obtained based on the known location information and by the space vector method. Furthermore, the azimuth and pitch angles of the airborne laser were solved through the coordinate transformation. Finally, driven by the mechanism, the laser-guiding positioning of the pipeline was fulfilled. With application of the laser clamping alignment mechanism independently developed by ourselves, the ground point-fixed experiment proves that the proposed algorithm can offer the accuracy of the ground positioning by 6.9 m, and it will be more accurate when the precision of the carrier aircraft attitude and the position sensor is further improved. Experiments demonstrate that the algorithm is suitable for the remote detection of the buried natural gas pipeline by airborne lasers.