A New Posture Plan for the Inspection Robot Capable of Clearing Obstacles in Power Transmission Line Maintenance

This paper describes the development of a mobile robot capable of clearing such obstacles as counterweights, crimp connection pipes, anchor clamps, and torsion tower. The mobile robot suspends on overhead ground wires of power transmission lines. Its ultimate purpose is to automate the inspection of power transmission line equipment. The robot with 13 motors has two arms and each arm has 4 degree of freedom. Claws are also mounted on the arms. An embedded computer and an opto-isolator I/O module based on PC/104 bus are chosen as the core of control system. A video capture card is installed to obtain the video information from cameras, and the communication system is based on wireless LAN TCP/IP protocol. An expert system based visual C++ is adopted to implement the automatic control. The energy source is a rechargeable voltage-regulated lithium-ion battery that can provide the power peaks required by the most demanding tasks and sufficient energy for a full day of operation. A prototype with careful considerations on mobility was built. The new posture plan is proposed for obstacles cleaning in the torsion tower. Results of experiments demonstrate that the robot can be applied to execute the navigation and inspection tasks.