Visual servoing of a new designed inspection robot for autonomous transmission line grasping

Abstract

This paper presents a new visual servoing using two lines features and this method is adopted for a novel dual-arm power transmission line inspection robot to grasp transmission line autonomously. The new designed inspection robot has 5 DOFs ofeach arm, and the arms for the wheel-arm platform will cross obstacle on the transmission lines alternately. With a new mechanism, the robot can actively control the position of its center of mass, thus enhancing its stability and reducing the load on motors when changing its configuration to overcome obstacles. Then an adaptive visual servoing using line features of two power transmission lines for the robot in an uncalibrated eye-in-hand setup is developed, guaranteeing the off-line arm can grasp the line automatically after overcoming obstacles. A new Lyapunov method is used to prove the asymptotic convergence of the errors to zero. The paper ends with the presentation of several simulation results.