Precise Positioning Method for Insulator Sheds Based on Depth Horizontal Histogram

Abstract

The insulator cleaning robot is essential to grid maintenance and personal safety, where the precise positioning of insulator sheds is the basis. However, due to the great differences in shape and color of the insulator, as well as the cluttered background in the substation, the traditional methods based on color and texture features can not achieve accurate positioning of the insulator shed. Aiming at the problem that the traditional features of insulator are easily submerged in the background, we propose a new depth horizontal histogram (DHH) feature and use it to achieve the accurate and fast positioning of insulator shed. In order to reduce the influence of complex background on insulator positioning, we directly bandpass filter the depth image of the insulator from the RGB-D (RGB and Depth) camera. To obtain the effective DHH feature, the filtered image is processed by rotation, horizontal projection, and morphology. Finally, we perform gradient detection on the DHH and achieve the precise positioning of the insulator sheds. The experiments show that, compared with traditional methods, our method can achieve precise positioning of the insulator shed and performs better in speed, accuracy, and adaptability.

Keywords

• Insulator cleaning robot
• insulator sheds positioning
• the DHH feature
• gradient detection