A cooperative heterogeneous Unmanned Autonomous Systems solution for monitoring and inspecting power distribution system

This paper presents a comprehensive solution to monitoring and inspection of power-line distribution system. This involves two robotic platforms which are heterogeneous and cooperative in executing tasks as planned. One of them is Robonwire which is a three-arms robot which moves on the transmission lines while the other is an Octacopter UAV. The UAV inspects the transmission tower while the Robonwire performs both inspection and monitoring of the lines by travelling on them. The Robonwire is capable of moving across and along the transmission lines by expansion and retraction. This enables the robot to handle and avoid the obstacles with minimum effort. The UAV is a vertical take-off rotorcraft comprising eight propellers designed to carry a payload of camera platform and wireless telemetry. In addition to inspection, the octacopter serves as a wireless relay node establishing data transfer between Robonwire and the ground station. An UAV test-bed is proposed to speed up the controller design and tuning of the quadcopter in the laboratory. Both the UAV-platform and Robonwire together provide complementary inspection roles: horizontally and vertically enable a cooperative behaviour. Preliminary simulation and experimental investigations the individual system is presented.