Development of an expert control strategy for controlling obstacle crossing of a high-voltage transmission line inspection robot

A rule based expert control system is designed for controlling a crawling robot to cross obstacles along highvoltage transmission lines. The objective of this study is to achieve automatic inspection of the line faults by using a remotely controlled inspection robot. The expert control strategy presented in the paper adopts the principles of artificial intelligence and embeds intelligent algorithms and strategies in the controller for the robot. The paper discusses the structure of the expert system based control strategy and the design methodology to derive the robot knowledge base and inference engine. VC++ and CLIPS are used as the programming languages for software design and implementation. The feasibility and practical applicability of the expert system are tested and verified through experimental study. The experimental results show that the control strategy works well with the satisfactory performance and has a great potential to be applied in practice.