Measuring Point Localization and Sensor Pose Control for Gas Insulated Switchgear Partial Discharge Detection Robot

In recent years, substation intelligent inspection robots have been widely used. However, gas insulated switchgear (GIS) partial discharge detection still relies on manual. The key to using the robot instead of manual GIS partial discharge detection is to locate the measuring point accurately and make the partial discharge detection sensor move quickly and precisely to the measuring point. In this article, we propose a measuring point localization method based on virtual visual servoing (VVS) and a sensor pose control method based on the pose-based visual servoing (PBVS) for GIS partial discharge detection robot. First, AprilTag, a vision fiducial system, was used to locate the measuring point, and the VVS was used to refine the estimated location. Second, the PBVS control law was designed to control the manipulator to steer the partial discharge detection sensor to the target pose. Then, the visual servoing control law was optimized using adaptive proportional gain to speed up the convergence of the control system; the control law was improved according to the first-order nonhomogeneous differential equation of the visual feature error to make the motion trajectory of the manipulator smoother. Finally, the proposed method was verified on the experimental platform. As a result, the proposed method can steer the partial discharge sensor to the target position quickly and precisely, which provides the theoretical basis and technical support for the robot to complete the GIS partial discharge detection.