This power transmission line inspection robot was designed by the team of Prof. Gongping Wu from Wuhan University. With this robot, I completed research on vision-based obstacle localization, and an academic paper entitled "Image Geometry based Obstacle Localization for a Power Transmission Line Inspection Robot" is ready for publication.
Abstract
Inspection robot is an important method to inspect power transmission lines (PTL), however, the robot is susceptible to be damaged by the collision with electric equipment. The aim of this study is to localize electric equipment to avoid collision. Two localization models are constructed to present the geometric relationship between the CCD camera and obstacle. In addition, according to the localization models, a localization algorithm is proposed, which is tested on a 1:1 simulation PTL using an inspection robot. Experimental results indicate that the robot can localize obstacles effectively, whereas the localization precision deteriorated progressively with the increase of the distance between the robot and obstacles. Therefore, two factors affecting the localization precision are analyzed and the methods to eliminate their impacts are presented to improve the localization precision.
