Coordinated optimal path planning of multiple substation inspection robots based on conflict detection

In recent years, there is an increasing interest in adopting intelligent robots to carry out the substation inspection tasks. With the recognition that a single substation robot generally takes a long time to complete the inspection task in most the high voltage electric substations due to limited sensing capability. To address the challenge of multiple inspection robots operation in electric substations, the path planning problem in the presence of complex substation environment needs to be studied. This paper exploited the path planning problem for multiple substation inspection robots and a time window based solution is presented. The proposed solution is implemented and assessed through simulation experiments and the numerical results demonstrated that the proposed solution is viable and efficient to avoid different types of conflicts in the path planning process. As a result, the proposed solution enables multiple substation robots to carry out inspection tasks simultaneously in the substations that significantly promote the efficiency of the substation maintenance.