To solve the problems in high-voltage transmission line inspection

such as fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)are incapable of fine inspection and multi-rotor UAVs move slowly and require remote pilot which may pose safety risks

a scheme for inspecting high-voltage transmission lines with multiple cooperating autonomous multi-rotor UAVs is proposed. A cooperative method is discussed for inspecting high-voltage towers and transmission conductors by deploying two networked UAVs at both sides of the power line

respectively. Machine learning and multi-agent consensus control algorithms are employed to design the autopilot controller for the UAVs. According to the above work

four four-rotor UAVs and a ground station are built to validate the proposed methods. In the experiment

two pairs of UAVs are deployed to inspect the high-voltage transmission line in parallel with each other. The result shows that the UAV-station system can finish the inspection work as expected

and are free from misreported defects. Compared to the single remote-pilot multi-rotor UAV when inspecting high-voltage transmission lines

the two-UAV cooperation scheme features autopilot

and the average speed of inspection is even higher than the maximal speed of single UAV. Moreover

the average time of inspecting a transmission tower is less than half of single remote-pilot UAV's. This work is supported by Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China(No. 20130185110023).