Mobile robot for hot spot monitoring in electric power substation

This article describes the development of an unmanned monitoring system for the detection of hot spots inside a power substation. It uses an infrared camera connected to a robot which moves along the substation via a steel cable inside the substation. The robot is remotely controlled by a wireless system, operating at a frequency of 2.45 GHz (WiFi). The camera is dynamically directed to different substation components through a pan-tilt system. The whole structure is controlled by a microcomputer software located in a control room, around 200 m away from the robot. Aside of controlling the robot pan-tilt movements, the software also performs the data acquisition and analysis of thermographic images, thus detecting the referred hot spots.