Robotic systems applied to power substations - A state-of-the-art survey

Allan, J.-F.; Beaudry, Julien

doi:10.1109/carpi.2014.7030049

Cited by 24 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Inspection robots are typically equipped with visible-light cameras and/or infrared thermographs and are sending the acquired information in real time to the data center for further processing (see, e.g., Wang et al 2012 for recent applications arising in the maintenance of electric power systems), where a magnetic guidance system is used to guide the robots. Dynamic charging is expected to significantly improve the efficiency of inspection robots in particular when employed for daily maintenance tasks (see, e.g., examples of brachiating robots in Menéndez et al 2017 and the survey by Allan and Beaudry 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Arc Routing with Electric Vehicles: Dynamic Charging and Speed-Dependent Energy Consumption

Fernández

Leitner

Ljubić

et al. 2022

Transportation Science

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Concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and government regulations foster the use of electric vehicles. Several recently published articles study the use of electric vehicles (EVs) in node-routing problems. In contrast, this article considers EVs in the context of arc routing while also addressing practically relevant aspects that have not been addressed sufficiently so far. These include dynamic charging of EVs while driving, speed-dependent energy consumption, and nonlinear charging functions that depend on the battery’s state of charge and the charging time. A generic way of dealing with these aspects is introduced through the concept of an energy-indexed graph, which is used to derive an integer linear programming formulation and a solution framework based on branch and cut. Efficient construction heuristics and a local search for approximately solving large-scale instances are proposed. A computational study is performed on realistic problem instances. Besides analyzing the performance of all proposed methods, the obtained results also provide insights into strategic decisions related to the battery size and the amount of charging facilities.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Arc Routing with Electric Vehicles: Dynamic Charging and Speed-Dependent Energy Consumption

Fernández

Leitner

Ljubić

et al. 2022

Transportation Science

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“…T HE inspection and surveillance in complex industrial sites, such as substations [1], nuclear power plants [2], and offshore platforms [3] play an essential role in terms of diagnosing device status, discovering abnormal, and preventing potential hazards. Such work has relied heavily on human labor, which makes no guarantee of data collection Fig.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To address this issue, using autonomous agents to replace human could be an efficient alternative. Among all kinds of agents, movable patrol robots have been studied for decades [1], [4], [5] because they could travel in unstructured terrains while perceiving, processing, and transferring data with decent accuracy 24 hours a day, ensuring that the equipment's vital information is interpreted correctly.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vector Detection Network: An Application Study on Robots Reading Analog Meters in the Wild

Dong¹,

Gao²,

Yan³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Analog meters equipped with one or multiple pointers are wildly utilized to monitor vital devices' status in industrial sites for safety concerns. Reading these legacy meters autonomously remains an open problem since estimating pointer origin and direction under imaging damping factors imposed in the wild could be challenging. Nevertheless, high accuracy, flexibility, and real-time performance are demanded. In this work, we propose the Vector Detection Network (VDN) to detect analog meters' pointers given their images, eliminating the barriers for autonomously reading such meters using intelligent agents like robots. We tackled the pointer as a two-dimensional vector, whose initial point coincides with the tip, and the direction is along tail-to-tip. The network estimates a confidence map, wherein the peak pixels are treated as vectors' initial points, along with a two-layer scalar map, whose pixel values at each peak form the scalar components in the directions of the coordinate axes. We established the Pointer-10K dataset composing of realworld analog meter images to evaluate our approach due to no similar dataset is available for now. Experiments on the dataset demonstrated that our methods generalize well to various meters, robust to harsh imaging factors, and run in real-time.Impact Statement-From the automatic meter recognition perspective, this work proposes an accurate, flexible, and readyto-use pointer detection algorithm that contributes to dealing with legacy pointer-type meters, which still serve in industrial sites to date and require extensive human inspection. Adopting this technique to automatic agents could save human labor and promote the effectiveness and efficiency of getting data. It also inspires particular object detection problems, wherein the object could be considered a vector whose position is concerned, and its orientation also matters. The proposed Vector Detection Network is agnostic to the semantic meaning of the vectors it detects. Thus it could also be used to detect objects of this kind, such as the branch of plants, helping the agriculture robots do accurate trimming.

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“…[4][5][6][7][8] Numerous promising robotic systems are developed for various areas, especially for unmanned inspection and maintenance of power industry. [9][10][11][12][13] Early robotic applications in power industry focus on manipulation and maintenance of outdoor transformer substations, EDF transmission, or overhead distribution lines. [14][15][16] Komoda et al 14 develop a substation patrol robot for overhead distribution line works manipulation and underground cable conduit monitoring.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The above robotic solutions could help increase the safety and comfort of workers, and reduce labor cost, but in general they are still in conceptual design stage and could not provide satisfying technical solutions for reliable and comprehensive equipment inspections. 10 With the evolution in robotics and computer vision, practical inspection robot begins to play an important role in outdoor substations. Pinto et al 17 describe the development of an unmanned monitoring system for the detection of hot spots inside a power substation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Design and Application of a Track-type Autonomous Inspection Robot for Electrical Distribution Room

Cheng

Xiang²

2019

Robotica

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SummaryElectrical distribution equipment inspection is crucial for the electric power industry. With the rapid increase in the number of electrical distribution rooms, an unattended inspection method, for example, autonomous inspection robot, is eagerly desired by the industry to make up for the deficiencies of traditional manual inspection in effectiveness and validity. Existing inspection robots designed for indoor substations are generally lack of practicality, due to the factors such as inspection requirements and robot weight. To bridge the gap between prototype and practicality, in this work, we design the first completely autonomous robotic system, LongSword, which provides a satisfying technical solution for equipment inspection with an optical zoom camera, a thermal imaging camera or a partial discharge detector. Firstly, we design a novel and flexible hardware architecture which allows the robot to move, lift, and rotate in the station to reach any desired position. Secondly, we develop an intelligent software framework which consists of several modules to achieve accurate equipment recognition and reliable failure diagnosis. Thirdly, we achieve an apposite integration of the existing technologies to implement an applicable robotic system that can fulfill the requirements of indoor equipment inspection. There are over 200 LongSwords currently serving about 160 electrical distribution rooms, some of which have been working for more than 1 year. The average precision of device status recognition is up to 99.70%, and the average inspection time of a single device is as short as 13.5 s. The feedback from workers shows that LongSword can significantly improve the efficiency and reliability of equipment inspection, which accelerates the process of setting up unmanned stations.

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Robotic systems applied to power substations - A state-of-the-art survey

Cited by 24 publications

References 33 publications

Arc Routing with Electric Vehicles: Dynamic Charging and Speed-Dependent Energy Consumption

Arc Routing with Electric Vehicles: Dynamic Charging and Speed-Dependent Energy Consumption

Vector Detection Network: An Application Study on Robots Reading Analog Meters in the Wild

The Design and Application of a Track-type Autonomous Inspection Robot for Electrical Distribution Room

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