Autonomous approach for high voltage transmission line inspection and fault detection

High Voltage Transmission line inspection and maintenance is an extremely dangerous employment due to the reason that such tasks are performed at high altitudes around high magnitude voltages. In countries like Sri Lanka, this employment has caused the demise of experienced technicians over the years. As a solution to this timely matter on power distribution sector, an autonomous approach is introduced to perform the inspection through remote operation. A Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) prototype was implemented to test the proposed approach in a single transmission line span. The intended functions of the proposed ROV are positioning, live video transmission and the sag template indication of the transmission line which are being explicated in this paper. The prototype was tested in a high voltage laboratory environment to verify the feasibility of operation. A magnetic energy harvesting circuit was designed and implemented to satisfy. © 2016, UK Simulation Society. All rights reserved.