A Soft-Robotic Gripper for Ultra-High-Voltage Transmission Line Operations

Live-wire service operations for high-voltage transmission lines, both inspection and maintenance, requires substantial human labor, resulting in health risks and prolonged service time. Recent trends are increasingly adopting robots to replace human equipotential workers during live-wire inspection operations, both to mitigate health risks and improve efficiency. Most of such robots are rigid-bodied with rigid end-effectors, which is challenging in weight-reduction, while requiring protections against the strong electromagnetic working environment. In this study, a pneumatic soft robotic gripper is designed with the benefits of being inherently soft, safe, conforming, anti-electromagnetic, as well as lightweight. With two fingers driven by four pneumatic soft actuators, the soft robotic gripper could lift over 21 times its self-weight and grasp a wide range of items from a typical Stockbridge damper, to a small stick in the validation experiments. To qualify for HV and UHV operations, the proposed soft gripper was tested for high voltage endurance, both for 550 kV AC and 1000 kV DC, with uninterrupted operations. With the list of unique and favorable features, pneumatic soft-robotic grippers will potentially be the ideal candidate for robotic high-voltage transmission lines inspection and maintenance operations, replacing humans from entering the harsh environment with extremely high life risks.