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...

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...

Path planning is indispensable in performing the inspection task using continuum robot in the environment like aircraft fuel tank. In order to obtain the optimal path and make it feasible for the robot traversal, a path planning strategy based on region division is put forward. The aircraft fuel tank is divided into several regions and mapped to a two-dimension plane by using dimension reductio...

In this paper a design and implementation of a remote control system of a manipulator for weld inspection of nuclear reactor vessels are described. Based on the client-server TCP/IP software architecture, the presented control system enables an operator to perform the entire inspection procedure remotely over a network, avoiding exposure to dangerous radiation normally present in nuclear reacto...

One of the most crucial elements of each country is electricity distribution networks (EDN). Awareness of accidents in EDN could be very important in the conservation and utilization of them. The accurate and periodic inspections can provide a good service to subscribers. The goal of this project is to fabricate a quad rotor, which can do an accurate and a periodic inspection. The design and im...

Traditionally pavement inspections are conducted using manually operated instruments, and hence are very labor-intensive. In this study, the authors propose the idea of using an autonomous robot to perform the pavement inspections, including for evenness and distress. Because inspection instruments are assumed to be mounted on the robot’s platform, this robot is capable of inspecting pavement c...