In order to supply the high-quality electric power, several researches have been conducted. For the high-quality power, it is necessary to inspect the power lines and insulators before the lines or insulators are disconnected or damaged. However, it is not enough to inspect all the power lines by human inspectors. In previous study, a power line inspection robot was developed to investigate the power lines and insulators. According to replace the human operators by the robot, the inspection robot has several advantages: the improved working conditions, machine accuracy, and the prevention of accident. However, the robot has some defects in its heavyweight. In this study, a lightweight inspection robot has been developed using a RP and a vacuum casting. And, this study developed a fault detection monitoring program for the high voltage equipment using a microphone which detects the location of fault and the thermal imaging and CCD cameras which verifies the fault and stores the image, respectively.

Robotic manipulators are increasingly deployed in complex environments or to perform complex tasks. Studies on dual-arm-robots have been continually carried out in robotics areas to provide robots in dangerous environments, similar to those which human beings would be normally in, without a special change to the working environment. In previous study, a dual-arm-robot has been designed. The robot, however, has some defects in its heavy weight and big shape. In order to reduce weight of an arm robot, the robot has been designed using a hollow-shaft-servo- assembly. The hollow-shaft-servo-assembly is composed of a hollow-shaft-servo-motor, a hollow- shaft-harmonic-drive, a hollow-shaft-brake, a hollow-shaft-encoder, and a servo-drive.

This paper presents cable-hydraulic driven 3DoF (Degree-of-Freedom) manipulator for cooperative robot with high output/low inertia and enhancing lager workspace of hydraulic manipulator. Hydraulic actuation could be solution to design more higher output manipulator than the one of electric motor actuation due to install actuation source and robot joint separated. In spite of this advantage, the conventional hydraulic driven manipulator using cylinder or vane actuator is not suitable for the candidate of cooperative robot because smaller workspace owing to small RoM (Range of Motion) hydraulic actuator. In this paper, we propose 3DoF manipulator with cable-hydraulic actuation which is more larger ratio of payload-to-weight than the one of conventional cooperative manipulator and larger workspace than the one of existing hydraulic driven manipulator. The performance of proposed manipulator was demonstrated by the experiments for confirming overall workspace task, high payload operation task under worst situation and comparing repeatability between developed manipulator and existed cooperative robots. The results of experiments showed that the appropriate performance of proposed manipulator for cooperative robot.