Substation Inspection Method Based on Air-Ground Collaboration

Given that the substation is an important node of the electric power system, and its operational status directly affects the stability and security of the power supply, regular and efficient inspections of the substation are of vital significance. A more comprehensive and finer inspection can be realized through the collaborative inspection of UAVs and ground-based intelligent robots. In this paper, we design a system for cooperative inspection of substations by robots and drones, and propose a multi-machine cooperative global path planning based on the improved A* algorithm and Bezier curves, which effectively reduces the number of bends and advances smoothly. The search time and the nodes to be selected of the improved A* algorithm are significantly shortened compared to both the breadth-first search and the traditional A* algorithm, while the number of corners in the same path is reduced from 21 to 5. At the same time, the robot is taken as the main body of path planning, the UAV follows in real time, and a new distributed feedback strategy is designed to control the motion of the point model on the plane, which controls the local relative position to realize the multi-intelligence body consistency formation without using the tree structure by methods such as dynamic feedback linearization. In addition to this, the UAV is also considered to be subject to electromagnetic interference from the substation, which ensures the safety of inspection while inspecting efficiently.