Design of the gripper for power lines inspection robot

This paper proposes a novel gripper for power transmission lines inspection robot. The proposed gripper has advantage of obstacles avoidance. The whole weight of the robot could be supported by the grippers with ball bearings design. The passive rolling motion through ball bearings greatly reduces the friction force between the power transmission cable and the robot, with the result of having a less damage to the cable. What´s more, the emergency braking parts are added to improve security. In addition, a pair of worm gears with self-locking characteristic is used together. It also has large workspace feature with good adaptability for inspection applications on different diameter cables. A test-bed was built for maneuverability evaluation. Numerous experiments were conducted, and the experiment results show that the proposed gripper is efficient for robots maneuverability.