In order to ensure the quality and reliability of electric power supplied to customers, power transmission lines must be inspected regularly. Aim to avoid artificial inspection work, intelligent power line inspection robot which can crawl along the transmission line is developed to accomplish some necessary operations, such as capturing and recording the videos of the environment around the power lines and towers. Several kinds of electric equipments settled on the power transmission lines are acting as obstacles to the inspection robot during continuous inspection work. So vision system is significant for an inspection robot to obtain surrounding environment information and to plan its behavior to stride over obstacles. Supported by 863 National High-Tech Research and Development Plan, we designed an DSP-based embedded monocular vision system to recognize and estimate the distance of the current obstacle for a special kind of power line robot which runs in partite transmission lines environment. This embedded vision system is characterized with compact size, low power cost and excellent performance in image acquisition and processing operations. This vision system can run real-time image processing algorithms on-line, and provide real-time obstacle information to the main controller of the robot, which means the robot can process and save the images and autonomously stride over the obstacles without the contact to the ground center. A new algorithm of the obstacle’s recognition is proposed and can recognize the electric equipments installed on the power lines such as spacers, counterweights, suspension clamp and strain clamp with isolator strings. According to the specific characteristic of the partite lines structure, an algorithm for obstacle distance estimation is proposed which can provide precise distance information of the obstacle to the main controller and help the robot to autonomously crawl along the transmission line in a long distance. The algorithm proposed overcomes the difficulty of distance estimation by monocular system. The system we designed was tested both in indoor simulation transmission lines environment and outdoor actual high-voltage transmission lines environment. Experiments showed that this system can work smoothly with high speed and precision, and can greatly reduce the burden of the main controller of the Inspection Robot, by providing significant routing information.
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