A novel tribrachiation robot for power line inspection and its inverse kinematics analysis

A novel tribrachiation robot for power line inspection was introduced in this paper. The robot mainly contains a dual parallelogram frame with three arms and a movable payload. The frame structure is simple, but it can make each offline arm move in 3D space by cooperative control of only five motors. Special designed arm endows the robot strong ability to climb steep line including the flexible jumper line, and the arm can leave off or re-grip on line automatically guided by approach sensors in the arm. Payload can adjust the robot centroid to decrease motor load. Line inspection robot can be categorized as a floating base robot and its inverse kinematic problem was solved by an iterative algorithm. Simulation results verify the performance of the algorithm from accuracy and computation time aspects. The prototype robot has shown its ability to cross obstacles in a lab environment.