Autonomous Live-Line Maintenance Robot for a 10 kV Overhead Line

Abstract

Live work is a dangerous and complex operation that endangers the lives of operators. This paper presents an autonomous live-line maintenance robot (ALMR), which is applied to 10 kV overhead lines. The ALMR can complete most of the operations automatically, requiring only a small amount of correction and operation. The paper briefly introduces the overall design of the ALMR. The main part of the paper describes the work carried out to realize automatic operation: (1) Propose a dynamic hierarchical task planning method that can decompose complex operations into a sequence of instructions that the robot can directly execute and can effectively deal with unexpected situations during operation; (2) solve the problem of recognition and positioning of cables under outdoor sunlight interference and complex backgrounds; (3) realize the robot’s motion planning in the live-line scene; (4) build a virtual environment to solve the telepresence problem of remote operation. Field experiments show that the ALMR can replace manual operations such as connecting and disconnecting lead-flow lines, and the operating efficiency is close to that of manual operations.

Keywords

• Live-line maintenance
• autonomous operation
• recognition and positioning
• motion planning
• virtual environment