Autonomous robotic monitoring of underground cable systems
The maintenance of distributed infrastructures requires the measurement of many of the physical variables of the system. Autonomous mobile robot platforms can be of help in these situations. The tasks facing a designer here include:
-The electromechanical design of the robot itself
-integration of the sensors which can estimate the physical properties of the system
-autonomous operation
The electromechanical and the sensing system design of the robot is described in this article. A multiprocessor distributed architecture is used in this system which makes the use of multiple sensors very much easy. There is also an option to switch from autonomous mode to the remote controlled mode. There are thermal and visual sensors for the purpose of monitoring the parameters of the system.
Lower cost, higher reliability of system operation and higher measurement accuracy are the obvious advantages offered by the robotic system.Here, a medium voltage system is used as the testbed for the autonomous mobile robotic platform .
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