1 INSPECTION OF HIGH VOLTAGE POWER LINES – A NEW APPROACH

This paper presents the “Cable Crawler”, a mobile teleoperated robot to inspect high voltage power lines. Its mechanism allows riding on the topmost ground cable of high voltage power lines and crossing a set of mast tips as well as smaller obstacles autonomously and thus is not limited to just move from mast to mast. The robot consists of an aluminium chassis, six propulsion units and two spaces for cameras and other electronic components. Six electrical motors drive independently six rubber-coated rollers, two in a horizontal position to take the weight and four vertical ones. The four vertical rollers are pressed onto the wire by springs, which guarantees slipless propulsion in difficult situations. A Matlab program controls the drives independently. An optical camera is mounted on the prototype, which can rotate 360 ° and the image can be transmitted wireless to the user’s computer monitor. With a mass of 58 kg and only six drives it consequently follows the industry’s wish to have a robust, easy to maintain and rather cheap solution. Regarding the fields examined by the robot, the project concentrated on the detection of trees growing into proximity of the wires