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.

케이블지지 교량 건설의 증가로 인하여 이러한 시설물의 안전 점검에 대한 관심도 점차 증가하고 있다. 케이블지지 교량에서는 주 부재인 케이블의 성능 평가가 필수적으로 이루어져야 함에 불구하고, 기존의 점검 방식으로는 다양한 제한적인 요인 때문에 적절한 점검이 이루어지지 못하고 있는 실정이다. 이러한 문제점을 보완하기 위해 케이블 점검 로봇 제작이 필요하고, 본 연구에서는 기존의 개발된 케이블 점검 로봇의 성능을 향상시켜서 로봇의 운용 효율성을 높이는데 주목적을 두었다. 성능 보완 요소로는 대 구경 케이블(>200mm)에도 적용할 수 있도록 로봇의 가용범위를 조절할 수 있도록 하였으며, 주행능력도 향상시켜 점검의 효율성을 향상시켰다. 케이블의 내부 손상을 점검하기 위해 전자기센서를 탑재하였고, 실내 실험을 통해 다양한 케이블 손상 유형에 따른 손상 검출 시험을 실시하였다. 추가로 현재 공용중인 교량에서 현장 성능평가를 실시하였다. 그 결과로 본 연구에서 개발된 케이블 점검 로봇은 주행속도에서는 ~0.2m/s로 기존의 점검 로봇에 비해 향상 된 주행 능력을 보였으며, 케이블 내부 손상 점검 실험에서는 케이블 손상 부분을 검출을 할 수 있었다. 마지막으로, 케이블 점검 로봇의 현장 검증 실험에서는 실내 실험과 같은 성능을 보이는 것을 확인하였다.

In this paper, we propose a cable climbing robot which can climb up and down the cables in the bridges. The robot mechanism consists of three parts: a wheel based driving mechanism, adhesion mechanism, and safe landing mechanism. The wheel based driving mechanism is driven by tooth clutches and motors. The adhesion mechanism plays the role of maintaining adhesion force by a combination of pantograph, ball screw, and springs even when the power is lost. The safe landing mechanism is developed for guaranteeing the safety of the robot during operations on cables. It can make the robot fall down with reduced speed by dissipating the gravitational forces. The robot mechanism is designed and manufactured for validating its effectiveness.

Since cable members are the major structural components in cable bridges, they should be properly inspected for surface damage as well as inside defects such as corrosion and/or breakage of wires. Starting from August 2010, a new research project supported by Korea Ministry of Land, Transportation Maritime Affairs (MLTM) was initiated to develop the cable inspection robot. In this study, only the vision-based surface damage detection system based on image processing techniques is addressed. The damage detection algorithm combines some image enhancement techniques with principal component analysis (PCA) to detect damages on cable surface. The images from three cameras attached to the cable climbing robot are wirelessly transmitted to the server computer at the cable support. They are processed with image enhancement method together with noise removal technique to improve overall image quality. Then they are projected into PCA sub-space. Finally, the Mahalanobis square distances of the projected images to all sample patterns are calculated. The smallest distance is found to be the match for the input image. The proposed damage detection algorithm was verified through laboratory tests on three types of cables.