A Novel Robot with Rolling and Climbing Modes for Power Transmission Line Inspection

As a hard high-altitude work, power transmission line inspection increasingly demands robots to conduct in place of the human being. A variety of robots have been developed to this end, with basic locomotion and inspection implemented on the lines. However, most current line inspection robots (LIRs) are only mobile platforms with complex structures and large weights, lacking sufficiently dexterous locomotion on lines, especially for obstacle overcoming and line transition. Also with sensors fixed on the platform, the inspection range is largely limited. For higher mobility and a larger inspection range, a novel biped robot that can roll and climb on a power transmission line for inspection, called Climbot-L, is proposed in this paper. While the rolling mode has the advantage of high locomotion efficiency, the biped climbing mode makes it possible to easily overcome obstacles on the line, transition to adjacent cables, and have multi-view detection. In this paper, the design of this novel robot is first introduced, the working principle of the wheel-gripper modules is then analyzed, and obstacle overcoming gaits are stated. The effectiveness and high maneuverability of the presented robot are verified by a series of experiments.