Abstract
Intelligent robotic inspection of power transmission lines has proved to be an excellent alternative to the traditional manual inspection methods, which are often tedious, expensive, and dangerous. However, to achieve effective automation of the robots under different working environments, the dynamic analysis and control of the robots need to be investigated for an efficient inspection process. Nonetheless, the application of control techniques for the position, speed and vibration control of these robots has not been explored in detail by the existing literature. Thus, an approach for precise motion control of the sliding inspection robot is presented in this paper. The main contribution of the study is that the chattering problem associated with the traditional command shaping time delay control (TDC) was minimized by smoothing the chattered input signal. Then, the improved control (iTDC) which is effective for oscillation control is hybridized with a pole placement based feedback control (PPC) to achieve both position and the sway angle control of the robot. The nonlinear and the linearized models of the sliding robot were established for the control design and analysis. Three parameters of the robot, namely, the length of the suspended arm, the mass of the payload, and the friction coefficient of different surfaces, were used to assess the robustness of the controller to model uncertainties. The iTDC + PPC has improved the velocity of TDC by 201% and minimizes the angular oscillation of PPC by 209%. Thus, the results demonstrate that the hybridized iTDC + PPC approach could be effectively applied for precise motion control of the sliding inspection robot.
Highlights
As the world is continuously becoming over-dependent on electricity, any power transmission failure could cause a catastrophic impact on people’s livelihood, including national security, health system, education, and economy
The position and the speed of the robot are unstable with infinite magnitude, while the angular displacement and its velocity are marginally stable, which reaffirmed the need for effective control
With the maximum velocity of 0.3125 m/s and sway angle of −1.2066°, the improved TDC (iTDC) + pole placement based feedback control (PPC) has improved the velocity of time delay control (TDC) by 201% and minimizes the angular oscillation of PPC by 209%
Summary
As the world is continuously becoming over-dependent on electricity, any power transmission failure could cause a catastrophic impact on people’s livelihood, including national security, health system, education, and economy. With the introduction and advancement of intelligent robotics, the power transmission line inspection robots gained a lot of recognition and have been in constant development to replace the tedious manual inspection approaches (Menendez et al, 2017). These inspection robots can be classified into three, namely, the ground robots for the inspection of substations (Wang et al, 2012, Wang et al, 2019, Wang et al, 2020), the flying robots (UAVs) (Máthé and Buşoniu, 2015; Shakhatreh et al, 2019), and the suspended robot that climbs and slide along the power line. The robot presented in this work is lightweight and can be automated
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