Attitude and Position Estimation for a Power Line Inspection Robot

Autonomous robot for a power transmission line inspection

A Climbing-Flying Robot for Power Line Inspection

Our society is becoming increasingly more dependent on reliable electric power supply. Since power outages cause substantial financial losses to the producers, distributors and also to the consumers of electric power, it is in the common interest to minimize failures on power lines. To detect the defects early and to accordingly schedule the maintenance activities, the distribution networks are...

Prototype Line Crawler for Power Line Inspection

In South Africa, electricity is supplied through thousands-of-kilometers of overhead power cables, which is owned by Eskom the national energy supplier. Currently monitoring of these overhead power cables are done by means of helicopter inspection flights and foot patrols, which are infrequent and expensive. In this paper, the authors present the design of a prototype power line crawler (inspec...

Design and Validation of a Mobile Robot for Power Line Inspection and Maintenance

This paper presents the LineScout Technology, a mobile teleoperated robot for power line inspection and maintenance. Optimizing several geometric parameters achieved a compact design that was successfully tested over many line configurations and obstacle sequences. An overview of the technology is presented, including a description of the control strategy, followed by a section focusing on key ...

A Nonlinear Filter for Range-only Attitude and Position Estimation

A nonlinear filter structure is proposed to estimate the attitude and position of a vehicle using range measurements only. In the setup adopted, the vehicle is equipped with an array of beacons that determine their range to a set of landmarks with known locations. This scenario arises for instance in underwater acoustic navigation and GPS multiple antenna systems. We consider a simple discrete ...