Automated inspection of electric transmission lines: The power supply system

The difficulty of the inspection tasks along electric transmission lines in order to ensure the safety of the line workers, combined with the interests to reduce the operation costs, makes the automation of the process to become interesting. The goal is to develop an autonomous robot which should run along the conductors while making the inspection. This robot needs energy. Several sources are considered but the line energy itself is selected as the best option. A system to take profit of the electromagnetic fields generated by the high voltage transmission tines is introduced in this paper. Experimental results have been obtained validating the viability of this kind of power supply system.