Screwing manipulation on power transmission lines with a robotic system

Abstract

Maintenance tasks with a robotic system on power transmission lines are challenging and still open. Taking adjustment of vibration dampers on transmission lines as a typical task, we in this paper address how to effectively fulfill screwing manipulation with a 5-DoF manipulator on a vehicle capable of moving along the lines. To reduce the restriction on end-effector orientation and to decrease the demand for driving force, we design a special wrench with a spherical knob as an assistant tool.Since workspace is a priori information for robotic manipulation, it is generated based on kinematic model of the manipulator. Especially, circular path of the end-effector is planned to drive the wrench for the screwing manipulation, and optimal kinematic performance is analyzed by taking the condition number of the manipulator Jacobian as a criterion in terms of the manipulator position with respect to the vibration damper. The success of screwing manipulation and the effectiveness of the special wrench and path planning are verified by simulation and experiment.

A Review on the Prospects of Mobile Manipulators for Smart Maintenance of Railway Track

“…Obstacles in a power transmission line include compression slices, vibration dampers, spacers, suspension clamps, etc., and the capability of crossing these obstacles is a desirable feature [85]. Simulations of and experiments using a mobile manipulator to adjust the vibration damper in the transmission line were performed in [14]. This robot hung on the line with the arm and moved along the line with the rolling wheel, as shown in Figure 12b.…”

“…With the help of multiple sensors and computational algorithms, mobile manipulators can perform various tasks, such as cleaning a nuclear reactor [12] or inspecting a railway tunnel [13]. With the recent advancement in sensor and computation technologies, the mobile manipulator has revealed many promising use cases in maintenance technologies across various industries [14][15][16][17]. These promising results substantiated an increment in productivity, efficiency, and safety for the human operators [18,19].…”