Thermographic inspection using a microcontroller-based camera positioning system

Infrared thermal cameras can be used to detect early-stage thermal anomalies in electrical or mechanical equipment and structures, before they lead to the interruption of their operation. In this work, we present a system to control the positioning and movement of a thermographic camera, mounted on a mechanical support with six degrees of freedom, employing the low cost microcontroller board Arduino. The proposed system moves the camera to positions set and configured a priori, and provides an automatic diagnosis of target elements on the camera´s field of view, based on thermographic images by applying image processing and artificial neural network techniques. The surrounding region of a step-up transformer located in the outer area of a hydroelectric power plant was selected to validate the system. The system also allows custom remote inspections within the camera´s field of view since it can be accessed online and be operated in manual mode.