Design and Its Visual Servoing Control of an Inspection Robot for Power Transmission Lines

A bi-branchiate robot is presented for the inspection of the high-voltage power transmission lines. With a symmetrical mechanical structure, the robot can roll along the power lines and negotiating all the obstacles in the lines to complete the inspection work. A hierarchical structure based on modular approach are used to design the control system of the robot. A combination mode composed of teleoperation via RF module and local intelligence based on visual servoing is developed to control the inspection robot. Using an image feature acquisition method based on Otsu adaptive threshold, the position and width of the power line in image plane are extracted as the basis of controller design. Experiments of obstacle negotiation and automatic line grasping in laboratory prove the effectiveness of the proposed robot prototype and the relative control method.