Research Of The Inspection Robot For Power Transmission Line

It is tedious, dangerous and difficult to inspect and maintain the power transmission lines. Even to present, most of the inspection and maintenance tasks are taken by workers. Obviously, tradition manual inspection and maintenance methods have many disadvantages: low efficiency, high cost, high error and missing inspection probability etc. It is quiet urgent to realize the automatic inspection and maintenance for the power transmission lines. Inspection robot for power lines is a kind of special robots which is aiming at providing a highly efficient robot system to complete the inspection and maintenance tasks with high quality, high efficiency and low cost. Many overseas and domestic researchers have introduced various inspection robot prototypes. However, the practical applications of them are limited and many key technique questions required to be solved.In this dissertation, the development history of inspection robot is described. The working environment of power transmission lines and the key technologies of inspection robot are discussed in detail. The mechanical structure of inspection robot is proposed which includes the wheel and claw mechanism, arm mechanism, guide and support mechanism and control box. The structure of the robot is designed to be capable of navigating on the lines and surmounting obstacles imitating the monkey's movement. The robot control system and ground system constitute the whole control system. The robot control system based on an embedded computer is mounted in the control box and is supposed to control the robot to accomplish the desired tasks. The remote ground system is installed on the ground station based on a portable computer.With the human-machine interface on the ground system, the operator on the ground can monitor the states of the robot and teleoperate the robot if necessary. The inspection system based on image processing technology is also introduced. The robot's mechanical structure is designed as a cable car with two multi-joint arms. With the wheel and claw mechanism, the robot can move or crawl on the ground wires of the power lines. The affiliated facilities on the ground wires are the obstacles for the robot. With the movement of the arms, the robot can surmount the obstacles which make the inspetion robot navigates on the wires freely. Two arms are designed to be suspended on the same side of the wire which can avoid the inference of the affiliated facilities like the towers. The robot mechanical structure is simple, easy to be manipulated and owns the abilities to accomplish the anticipated tasks.The locomotion mode and attitude balance condition of the robot on the power line are analyzed. Using the virtual prototype technology, the typical tasks are discussed and the working processes are presented by the form of animation. The discussion results show that each step can be divided into several basic movement of the robot. The results also validate the mechanical structure and give the essential data for task planning and automatic control.The dynamic equations of the power lines which are supposed to be flexible catenary cabls are derived base on the Hamilton's principle and FEM. The dynamic equations of the inspection robot are derived based on the Newton-Euler method. The coupled relationship between the robot and the power line is built with the auxiliary coordinate system and the homogeneous transformation matrix. Based on the rigid-flexible coupling model, the typical working stats with the influence of the wire's vibration and deforamtion are discussed including wheeled locomotion, crawling locomotion, obstacle surmounting process, operating arm positioning locomotion. The influence of the wind load on the robot's locomotion is considered too.The control system is an essential part of the inspection robot system. The control system is required to accomplish the robot manipulating tasks on the ground wires with high reliability, stability, manipuility and maintainability. The robot control system and ground system constitute the architecture of the whole control system. The robot system accomplishes the environment sensing, motion control, attitude control and task planning etc. The ground system accomplishes the state monitoring, the inspection data storage and processing.The experiment and test results show that the inspection robot system has possessed the capabilities of navigation and inspection tasks on the power lines. The project has fulfilled the technical requirement of power transmission system and has a good application prospect.