Electrical substation inspection and intervention robot, field experiments

Aging infrastructures bring major challenges to electric utilities. Despite important resources invested in maintenance and replacement of assets, transmission networks continue to age. Substations day-to-day operations are consequently facing constraints due to personnel safety and security. Asset management is also becoming increasingly challenging. At the same time, recent advances in terrestrial mobile robotics, embedded computing, sensing and robotic manipulation allows for faster integration of subsystems into new robotic systems, at lower costs. Using robots in electrical substations has been studied and demonstrated by some utilities worldwide. Given this context and within a really short timeframe, a team of researchers at IREQ developed and field demonstrated a robot system that allows personnel to remotely accomplish multi-sensor inspections and live operations on numerous substation equipments. Robotic teleoperation therefore alleviates dangerous conditions for personnel and paves the way for valuable systematic inspection of equipments. The video shows various aspects of the system operated within substations. Index Terms—Substation, inspection, intervention, robot.