A novel shrimp rover-based mobile robot for monitoring tunnel power cables

Accurate, real-time information about the aging status of tunnel power cables can reduce the risk of urban power-grid breakdown effectively and avoid huge economic losses due to kinds of failures of power lines. Because of tunnel power cables being in quite rigorous environmental conditions, it is hard to get the aging status information by people themselves or normal robots. To cope with this challenge, we propose a novel wheeled mobile robot for unstructured environment based on existing shrimp rovers. It can climb over the obstacles on power cables thanks to its special mechanical structure and the balance slide which makes the robot keep balance constantly while tracking along tunnel power cables.