Power Substation Inspection Robot

Design and Developement of Autonomous Power Substation Inspection Robot

POWERGRID is presently operating 1,70,224 ckms of transmission lines along with 262 substations with 4,51,351 MVA transformation capacity. To maintain such vast network with more than 99% availability, it is challenging and requires lot of resources. Substations are the nodes of electrical grids, ensuring reliability, efficiency, and sustainability of electricity transmission and delivery.

In order to address the demands that arise during construction, refurbishment, and operation and maintenance (O&M) of substations, substantial efforts have been made to develop robots capable of assisting or replacing engineers in the performance of repetitive and/or dangerous tasks comprising the substation lifecycle. A further advantage of O&M robotics is that it can increase availability, as many facilities are unattended, yet must be continuously operational. POWERGRID and IIT Kanpur are jointly developing an autonomous mobile robot for inspection of substations to take care of repetitive and time-consuming inspection activities on a regular basis. The robot will be equipped with a wide array of sensors (IRIS control cameras, IR thermal sensors, LIDAR, fire alarms) and an autonomously (along with tele-operation feature) navigating platform which will roam around a substation and perform regular inspection for any damages in components that are essential for continuous running of the sub-station.

The robot will utilize advanced vision processing and machine learning algorithms to independently identify and flag any damages or failure to any critical components in the substation and automatically trigger an alarm. Use of such robot will also allow ground staff to access areas in a substation that are manually difficult to inspect. The robot will be trained using condition monitoring algorithms based on machine learning. This will enable the robot in damage identification, classification and prognosis of every sub-system. The procedure will upgrade the maintenance from routine monitoring to a continuous monitoring system and enhance the life of the components significantly.