WRES: A Low-Temperature Regulation and Enhancement System for Power Distribution Grid Maintenance Robots

Distribution grids extend the power grid towards each end users, therefore covering a wide range of latitudinal and climatic variations across the globe. Maintaining and servicing the distribution grids by human workers present significant life risks directly resulting from cold weather, making robotic replacement a pressing necessity. However, when facing similar cold-weather challenges, robots also require specific enhancements when the working climate conditions extend beyond their regular range of tolerance. With very few existing works tacking this issue, this work presents a lowtemperature enhancement and regulation system specifically for distribution grid maintenance robots. The main goal is to provide viable enhancements to continuously operate down to 30 degrees Celsius (-22 Fahrenheit) extreme ambient temperature, while optimizing battery life for longer operation time. The proposed system consists of a novel integrated temperature regulation system paired with an embedded element insulation layer for heat-dissipation control. A prototype system has been developed and tested in a series of validation experiments, demonstrating the efficacy and performances of the proposed system, paving the way to allweather robotic distribution grid maintenance under extreme cold conditions.