Motion Planning of Non-collision Obstacles Overcoming for High-Voltage Power Transmission-Line Inspection Robot

Abstract

Considering an mobile robot with double-arms-symmetric suspension structure moving along high-voltage transmission phase line with obstacles, the motion planning for obstacles-overcoming can be programmed into four stages, namely, detection, identifying and localizing obstacles, crossing-arm manipulator disengaging the conductor, crossing-arm passing the obstacles without collision, and manipulator capturing the conductor. First, two electromagnetic sensors installed on each robot arm were employed to detect, identify and localize obstacles. Then, combining with forward and inverse kinematics solution, cubic polynomial interpolation algorithm and simulation method, a collision detection model based on known surrounding was established to get an optimal no-collision moving path and corresponding joint variables. Thirdly, three groups of electromagnetic sensors were adopted to map the robot arms’ pose relative to conductor. In the second and fourth obstacles-overcoming stage, the pose adjustment of the robot is navigated by the signals of the sensors array. The motion planning strategy proposed in this paper has been successfully applied in an autonomous inspection robot.