Design Of A Clamping Inspection Robot For Overhead Ground Wire

The safe operation of high-voltage transmission lines is significant, so that it must be checked and maintained regularly. At present, the most commonly used methods in the line inspection are manual inspection and helicopter inspection. Manual inspection is labor intensive, inefficient and dangerous. The disadvantage of helicopter inspection is its high cost. The researches of inspection robot are generally in the experimental stage. Few practical products are applied to the actual line inspection.This paper presents a design of overhead ground wire inspection robot and concludes the design is valid on the basis of experiments. The robot obstacle-crossing method is proposed after analyzing the feature of insulators, clamps, shock hammers and other obstructions on the overhead ground wire. A clamping arm with a pair of walking wheel on both sides of the overhead ground wire is designed. This method helps control the clamping force, which enables the robot walking on slope line successfully. The key parts of the robot are designed by UG software, and the parameters of the components are ultimately determined after repeated experiments, then an experimental prototype is manufactured.The robot control system adopts Microchip’s ds PIC30F4011 Digital Signal Controller(DSC) as the main controller, integrated with a power-supply module, a motor-drive module, a sensor module, a serial-port camera module and a wireless communication module. Based on the above control system, a robot obstacle-crossing program is then written, and the whole system is developed. Besides the basic function, the design uses the serial-port camera to capture images, which helps to determine the type of obstacles and the direction of the overhead ground wire accurately, and benefits the robot to adapt more complex patrol environment.The debugging and experimental result shows that the robot clamping mechanism can make the robot clamping overhead ground wire tightly and walk smoothly. The robot also has the ability to cross insulator obstructions on the line accurately. This result preliminary achieves expected goals and lays the foundation for practical use of inspection robot.