Path-selection control of a power line inspection robot using sensor fusion

A new wire detection algorithm for power line inspection by a mobile robot has been proposed in this paper. There have been a lot of studies in order to support the high-quality electric power. For the high-quality power supply, it is necessary to investigate the power lines and insulators before the lines or insulators were disconnected or damaged. Although Korea Electric power Corp. has made many efforts for the quality improvement, it is not enough to inspect all the power lines by human inspectors. According to this problem, it is decided to replace the human operators by the power line inspection robot. When the robots are used for the inspection, there could be several advantages, for example, the working efficiency and the prevention of accident. And also the shortage of human power for dangerous jobs can be resolved. In this paper, as a part of the development of power line inspection robot, DECRO, the sensor fusion and fuzzy control algorithms are developed to detect the wire and slope of the wire. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is proved by the real experiments with DECRO which is under development so far.