Path planning for power transmission line inspection robot based on visual obstacle detection

In this paper an autonomous mobile robot is proposed for inspecting power transmission lines in mountainous regions. After a brief introduction of background and the robot mechanism, the key functionalities of the inspection robot - obstacle detection in traveling, path planning in obstacle crossing and large-angle line climbing, are discussed in detail. Obstacles are detected and recognized efficiently by a visual method. The obstacle description is built based on visual obstacle detection and a feasible obstacle crossing path is found using a visual graph algorithm. Finally, some field experiments are carried out to show that the robot can work well on the power transmission lines in mountainous regions with the aforementioned functionalities.