Abstract: An image-based visual servo control scheme is designed to guide the inspection robot to negotiate obstacles.Based on Fourier descriptors,the feature vector of the driving wheel contour is constructed,which is an invariant to rotation,scaling,translation and starting point,then the recognition of driving wheel is realized.The image features are extracted and the driving wheel-powerline relative pose is estimated.A proportional control law with dead zone is given to achieve the driving wheel-powerline alignment operation.The experimental results with simulation power line show that the visual servo control scheme can achieve the driving wheel-powerline alignment reliably.