A Climbing-Flying Robot for Power Line Inspection

Abstract

The most important decisive factor for choosing the robot type is certainly performance to price ratio. A big portion of the final price is usually the cost of development. The robot performance is a combination of inspection quality, autonomy and universality. We can conclude that the flying robot would likely have the smallest performance to price ratio (table I). Namely, this robot, although universal and easy to design, would offer the lowest inspection quality and low inspection autonomy. The development costs would certainly be very high for the climbing robot but the robot would be much more autonomous and could offer better inspection quality. The latter also holds true for the climbing-flying robot, which would probably not be as autonomous as the climbing robot when crossing obstacles but the cost of development should be much lower. In conclusion, the power pick-up system and automatic visual inspection are problems that still need to be solved efficiently for the flying robot, while automatic power line tracking and obstacle avoidance need further improvements to become practically feasible. The climbing robot also needs further developments of the power pick-up system, automatic visual inspection, electromagnetic shielding, robot mechanism and the control system. The proposed climbing-flying concept for power line inspection has not been researched yet, offering a number of specific challenges, such as high communication link bandwidth and reliable system for landing on the conductor. Nevertheless, the proposed concept seems feasible from the practical point of view and because good performance to price ration could be obtained