Control of an inspection robot for 110KV power transmission lines based on expert system design methods

The paper presents a new control strategy and its real-time implementation for a power transmission line inspection robot based on expert system design methods. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed to coordinate the operations between distributed expert systems, in which the principle of the goodness to fit to the rules and facts is employed for decision making and reasoning. To implement the control strategy, a combination of computer languages including C, VC++ and CLIPS are adopted that provide a convenient and effective software platform. On-line experiment results show that the control strategy can guide the inspection robot to patrol along the transmission lines and cross various typical obstacles efficiently. At the locations of corners and bends of the transmission line, more complicated obstacles occur, so two sub-expert systems work together and guide the robot passing through the locations smoothly. At those locations, the speed of the robot obviously slows down for safety consideration