An inspection robot for feeder cables-snake like motion control

The authors discuss the basic control structure for an inspection robot for feeder cables. Since the feeder cables stretch over an extremely long distance, automatic inspection is necessary. Feeder cables have many irregular points, i.e feeder branches, insulators, and so on, and thus development of such robots is difficult. As a first stage of the development, an attempt has been made to build a prototype which can pass through vertical-type irregular points. The prototype has a multicar structure with joint connections and a snakelike motion control architecture. The mechanical structure and control architecture are described, and it is shown that such a robot can run on the cable smoothly with enough speed, and can avoid vertical irregular points