Design and Implementation of a Task-Oriented Robot for Power Substation

With the dramatically increasing number of substations, the robots are expected to inspect equipment in power industry. This paper presents a task-oriented robot for inspection in power substation. The patrol mode of the robot comprises teleoperation, regular inspection, special inspection and a key return mode. The robot only relies on a low-cost magnetic sensor for lateral positioning and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology for longitudinal positioning when working under patrol mode. The positioning error is proven to be within 5 mm, comparing 20 cm by integrated GPS-DR navigation. The test result shows that the robot could work efficiently and reliably in power substation.