Designing a robotic complex for power line diagnostics

Abstract

Crucial economy in work-time and human operators’ workload can be achieved by using a fully autonomous robotic complex for power lines diagnostics. In this paper, the mobile robotic complex is presented that consists of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle with rotary wings, wheeled platform and onboard diagnostic devices. The design of the platform allows the robotic complex to fly in the direction of a power line without being flipped over. The quadrotor part of the robotic complex is capable to taking off from the ground and landing, to taking the position on the power line wires and to relocating itself from one position to another in the air in fully automatic mode. Docking to a lightning protection cable is also possible. The onboard devices provide scanning the path, making trace maps, finding and recording defects on the wires or other faults and sending recorded data. The platform and the onboard devices are balanced so that the center of gravity lays on the vertical central axis of symmetry below the power line wires during inspection. Actually, the robotic complex is equipped with a thermal imager and an ultraviolet camera to search for damage a few kilometers away. It will be supplemented in the near future with new advanced devices for repair work. Thereby, just one such complex will be able to serve more than a thousand kilometers of power lines in automatic mode. The developed approach to the robotic maintenance of power lines allows quickly to eliminate accidents on electric systems and reduce the injure risk for the technical staff.