Dezheng Zhao

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.

Development of Database System for Overhead Power Transmission Line Inspection Robot

In order to store and manage the basic information and inspection task for overhead high voltage power transmission line inspection robots, a database system is built up. This database system can store and manage such information as sensor information, historical data, report, inspection task, and line fault detected. Moreover, there is a simple line fault expert database in the database system developed for automatic line fault detection of the robots. SQLite is adopted as the backend database in this system. According to the specific requirements of the actual inspection application, the E-R model of the database system is designed, which is composed of two parts: sensor data model and line inspection model. Application experiments reveal that this database system can accomplish the information storage and management work for inspection robots.