220～500kV Unattended Transformer Substation Crawler Inspection Robot

Transformer substation is an important part of the power system. Currently the main inspection way is manual inspection. Many factors lead to low efficiency, work don't be completed, hidden faults of the equipments can't be found in time and some other problems. Especially in the past few years the automation level of power system has been highly enhanced and the development of the transformer substation non-humanization, these problems become more and more obvious. Under the background, intelligent mobile robot inspection with infrared thermal imager can be a good way. The robot system is able to finish a lot of work that manual inspection can't attach to and enhanced the level of automation.Navigation system is the base of robot automatic movement. In this paper many navigation ways are analyzed and compared. Three navigation systems have been tested in this project and the integrated navigation system of LMS/GPS is finally chosen to be the main navigation system.Wireless network is used to transfer data to the base station. Substation is a terrible wireless environment. In this paper the reasons of regular wireless network can't work are analyzed. After months'field tests we found the wireless bridge with rapid roaming algorithm could solve this problem and give some advices about equipment selection.It's also important to make sure that the battery always works in good condition, especially in the long way. This paper proposes a battery administration system and intelligent charging scheme.The robot of this project is tested and debugged in Shenyang Shaling500kV EHV substation and could accomplish the target of automatic inspection.