Control Strategy and Implementation of an Inspection Robot for 110kV Power Transmission Lines

A new control strategy and its real-time implementation were presented for a power transmission line inspection robot based on expert system. Furthermore an algorithm was proposed to coordinate the operations between distributed expert systems, in which the principle of the goodness to fit to the rules and facts was employed for the decision making and reasoning mechanism. To implement the control strategy, a combination of computer languages including C, VC++ and CLIPS were adopted to provide a convenient and effective software platform. On-line experiment results show that the control strategy can guide the inspection robot to patrol along the transmission lines and cross various typical obstacles efficiently. At the locations of corners and bends of the transmission line, more complicated obstacles occur, so two sub-expert systems work together and guide the robot passing through the locations smoothly. At those locations, the speed of the robot obviously slows down for safety consideration.