AN AUTOMATED VISION BASED APPROACH FOR HIGH-VOLTAGE INSULATOR TESTING

This paper proposes a novel vision based method for the live-line testing of insulators in high voltage overhead transmission lines. The proposed approach is to install a robot manipulator on a mobile insulated platform from where it can carry out the testing of insulators. This method can also be applied to a few maintenance tasks. The position and orientation (i.e. location) of the manipulator with respect to the featured environment is determined by using an efficient location determination algorithm which uses the correspondences between features in the environment and their gray level image. The algorithm calculates the rotation and translation of the CCD camera separately using a least squares technique, which can also be used to check the validity of the correspondence data set. It has also been demonstrated that by using a simple and efficient image processing technique the image data required by the location determination algorithm can be generated. The main motivation for this proposed method is to make the preventive maintenance procedures faster and the working environment safer for the lineman.