A Shared Control Scheme for Teleoperation of Hot Line Work Robots

As a result of highly information oriented society, uninterruptible power supply has become very important. Hot-line work robots (HLWRs) which provide comfortable and safe work environments have been introduced to perform outage-free maintenance of distribution lines. Regardless of the layout of the robotic system, the manipulator operation and control greatly affect the performance of the HLWR. In addition to the manual operations, the scope of autonomous work of the HLWR has been expanded to reduce the labor requirements. In order to fuse the two operation functions naturally and efficiently, a control sharing scheme based on event-based planning and control theory is proposed for the hot line work robots in this paper. With the proposed shared control method, the human operator can modify the autonomous motion whenever he/she wants. It integrates human intelligence with robot intelligence and enable the HLWR to perform tasks which cannot be done by either manual operations or autonomous operations alone. The control scheme is implemented and tested on an ABB IRB 1200 robotic arm system with a fixed base and shows a good performance in obstacle avoidance.