Development and Implement of an Inspection Robot for Power Substation

Along with the development demand of intelligent power substation, mobile robot is implemented to serve power substations. The robot is equipped with inspecting sensors, such as CCD camera and thermal infrared imager which are together referred to as workload. These inspecting sensors are used to detect the environment parameters e.g. reading meter, measuring temperature etc., inside the substation. However, due to the strong electromagnetic interference inside substation, accurate localization of the workload and inspection robot is still a difficult problem to be solved. Existing methods solve the problem by paving magnetic strips or rail. However, in this way, the working area of the robot is limited by the paved infrastructures. In this paper, an inspection robot system is developed for working in substation. In the proposed system, the localization of the robot is realized using adaptive Monte-Carlo localization based on the known environment model. A visual servo system is designed to realize the high accuracy localization of the workload. The proposed robot system should guarantee to obtain fine inspecting results of equipments in substation.