Robotic monitoring of power systems

Monitoring of electric power systems in real time for reliability, aging status, and presence of incipient faults requires distributed and centralized processing of large amounts of data from distributed sensor networks. To solve this task, cohesive multidisciplinary efforts are needed from such fields as sensing, signal processing, control, communications, optimization theory, and, more recently, robotics. This review paper focuses on one trend of power system monitoring, namely, mobile monitoring. The developments in robotic maintenance for power systems indicate significant potential of this technological approach. Authors discuss integration of several important relevant sensor technologies that are used to monitor power systems, including acoustic sensing, fringing electric field sensing, and infrared sensing.