Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life
Vol. 5(3); December (2018), pp. 157–160
DOI: 10.2991/jrnal.2018.5.3.3; ISSN 2405-9021 print; 2352-6386 online
https://www.atlantis-press.com/journals/jrnal

Research Article

Design and Development of Three Arms Transmission
Line Inspection Robot
Muhammad Fairuz Abdul Jalal*, Khairul Salleh Mohamed Sahari, Ho Ming Fei, Justin Chan Tuck Leong
Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Kajang, Selangor 43000, Malaysia

ARTICLE INFOABSTRACTArticle History

The high-voltage transmission line had been used primarily for power distribution from power plant or power station to theend users. However, the transmission line is highly prone to damage due to exposure to various thermal–mechanical loadings
and material degradation. Therefore, periodical inspection on transmission line after prolonged service is needed to prevent any
failure before it happens. In this paper, we present a new design of three arms inspection robot for transmission lines. The robot
is able to transverse along the line and bypass the in-line obstacles namely the anti-vibration hammers, spacer, strain clamps
and others. The design of the inspection robot in term of the robot design and configuration with slotted cam at each arm ispresented. The detailed analysis via simulation with respect to the robot stability; kinematic and movement analysis; and power
consumption during operation is executed to make sure the proposed design able to do the inspection without any unexpecteddifficulties. Later, the lab testing on the developed prototype is done for feasibility study and validation.

Received 19 July 2018
Accepted 12 November 2018
Keywords
Inspection robot
transmission lineslider© 2018 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

1. INTRODUCTION
High-voltage transmission lines is one of the main elements in
power distribution from the power plant or power station to thecustomer. However, the transmissions line is exposed to various
environment conditions namely thermo-mechanical loading,mechanical tension, material degradation and material corrosion.
The transmissions lines undergoing such circumstances eventuallylead to many problems such as electrical breakdown or even major
accident if transmissions lines were not being inspect, fixed andreplaced in appropriate time [1].
The process of inspections of transmission line involved activities
such as changing the ceramic insulators and switching on or off
the circuit in between poles [2]. The manual inspection routine oftransmission line is very tedious, dangerous and time-consuming
inspection session [3]. The development of the mobile inspection
robot will not only create a safer work environment in the transmission line inspection job, but also improve the efficiency of theinspection process [3].
Various line inspection robots have been developed and proposedby researchers. Wang et al. [4] proposed a two arms transmission
line robot. This robot utilized a line walking mechanism that basedon biped structure either having both feet placed on the line or eachfeet is placed alternatively on and off the line. Another dual arm
robot self-balancing was developed by Songyi et al. [5]. The twoarm of the robot hold onto the transmission line and move with thewheel installed on the arm. The robot is integrated with counter* Corresponding author. Email: MFairuz@uniten.edu.myweight to improve the robot stability while travelling on the transmission line.
Xu et al. [6] developed a three arms transmission line robot that­features two supporting arms and one assistant arm placed in
between both supporting arms. This robot was designed to overcome obstacles by evading them with the lifting mechanism on eacharm. Rui et al. [7] developed three arm transmission line inspection
robot. The robot arms consist of rubber wheel and the both outerarm installed with gripper to hold unto the line. The rubber wheel
enables the robot to bypass minor obstacles for instance the splicerand damper.
Our research group already took initiatives to propose various
conceptual design and selection based on requirement set byTenaga Nasional Berhad, the main utility supplier to peninsular
Malaysia [8]. In this paper, the prototype of a three arms transmission line inspection robot is presented. The robot has thecapabilities to pass over in-line obstacles without deteriorating
the robot stability.

2. TRANSMISSION LINE INSPECTIONROBOT DESIGN
2.1. General Design Requirement
There are many components, which are installed on the transmission line for various purposes namely tension insulator chain, suspension clamp, damper, tension clamp, jumper, splicing sleeve andothers depending on type of transmission line as shown in Figure 1.

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It is deemed necessary for robot to bypass these in-line components
so that the inspection process can be executed effectively [9].

2.2. Transmission Line Inspection RobotThe robot travel on the transmission line with the help of rollers
that installed in each arm and cross obstacles by moving its arm
up by rotating the power screw installed in each arm. The robot is
installed with six motors; three motors run the roller at each arm
for traversing on the transmission line. The others three motors areattached to the power screw for bypassing the in-line obstacles. The
conceptual design and the prototype are shown in Figure 2.
The three arms robot is hanged to the transmission line by meansof roller and lower jaw as a griping element. The movement is propelled by the roller at each arm. Each roller is powered by a motoras shown in Figure 3.
The mechanism to bypass obstacle is illustrated in Figure 4. The
gripping position and bypassing obstacle movement are realized
by the rotational direction of the motor linked to power screw. To
bypass the in-line obstacle, the motor is then actuated. The powerscrew pushes the arm upwards. As the arm moves up, it follows

the curve of the slotted profile. The bottom of the arm will have apin joint with a support to enable it to rotate as the arm follows thecurve of the slot. The arm will move back to its original position by
reversing the motor direction and the wheel on arm attached backto the line. The same step applied to the following next two arm.
The mechanism to bypass the obstacles is shown in Figure 5.
The stability of the transmission line inspection robot is an important aspect to be considered as it influences the overall quality of theimage taken during the inspection process.

3. RESULT AND DISCUSSION
3.1. Capability to Bypass Obstacles
The robot must be able to avoid obstacles along the transmission line or else the design will be deemed as a failure. Figure 6
shows that the roller and lower jaw do not interfere with theline as the arm gripper loosening and tightening its grip to thetransmission line.
The clearance between the arm and the obstacles is ranged from90 to 130 mm and the maximum angle of arm rotation 21.6° asshown in Figure 7.

Figure 4 | Mechanism to bypass in-line obstacles
Figure 1 | Transmission line environment [9]abcFigure 5 | The arm movement to bypass obstacles. (a) initial state (b)obstacle bypassing state (c) return back to initial state
Figure 2 | The conceptual design (left) and prototype of the three arms
transmission line inspection robot (right)

Figure 3 | The front view (left) and side view (right) of the gripper

Figure 6 | The arm gripper during loosening (left) and tightening (right)
its grip to the line

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the operation. The average change of X-axis is 10.33 mm and Y-axis
is 8.07 mm. The average distance between center of mass in various
arm configuration is 13.1 mm. The results are plotted in X–Y plane
as shown in Figure 9.

3.3. Motor Torque and Power Consumption

Figure 7 | The arm gripper during loosening (left) and tightening (right)
its grip to the line

The value of the motor torque required to rotate the power screw tomove the arm up for bypassing the obstacle is analyzed in Solidworks
Motion. The motor speed is set to reach 225 rpm based on the motorspecification. The time needed for the arm to move up to bypass theobstacle is 20 s. The average motor torque and power consumption
are 13 Nm and 0.254 W. The graph of the motor torque and power
consumption against time is shown in Figure 10.
Table 1 | The coordinate of the center of mass by various arm configuration
CoordinateXYZArm configuration
123

4

88.45
250.65207.5898.78
258.67207.5898.80
258.83207.5898.80
258.83207.58Figure 8 | The coordinate center of mass extracted from simulation

3.2. Stability Analysis

Figure 9 | The coordinate of robot center of mass in X–Y plane fordifferent arm configuration

The significant changes of robot center of mass for bypassing theobstacle provide instability and tendency for the robot to swing.
The analysis of the design center of gravity is done by means ofcenter of mass analysis of the following arm configurations:(i) Configuration 1: Original configuration; all the arms rest on
the transmission line.
(ii) Configuration 2: The first arm move up to avoid obstacles
while the other two arm rest on the line.
(iii) Configuration 3: The second arm move up to avoid obstacles
while the other two arm rest on the line.
(iv) Configuration 4: The third arm move up to avoid obstacles
while the other two arm rest on the line.
The robot XYZ axis and the value of center of mass for each configuration is extracted from the CAD software is as shown in Figure 8.
The coordinate center of mass of the different arm configuration istabulated in Table 1.
There is a small change in the coordinate of the center of mass in theX- and Y-axis as the robot change its configurations from the original configuration while the Z-axis remained constant throughout

Figure 10 | Graph of motor torque (top) and power consumption(bottom) against time

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4. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the three arms transmission line inspection robot andthe analysis of robot stability and motor are presented. The mechanism to bypass the in-line obstacles is achieved by using powerscrew and slotted profile. The robot is proven to be stabile during
operation due to minimal changes of its centre of mass.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by the Universiti Tenaga Nasional
Bold (TNB) Grant 102289176/B/9/2017/63 and Internal Grant
J510050707. The author would like to thank the TNB for the access ofinformation and data for formulating the robot design specification.

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Authors Introduction
Mr. Muhammad Fairuz Abdul Jalal
He is a lecturer at Department ofMechanical Engineering, Universiti
Tenaga Malaysia. He received hisDiplom -Ing. (FH) in MechanicalEngineering and MSc. in Mechatronics
from University of Applied Sciences
Ravensburg - Weingarten Germany in2008 and 2010 accordingly.
His research interest include robotic,
design methodology and inspection
system for power industry. He is a member of International
TRIZ Association.

Dr. Khairul Salleh Mohamed Sahari
He is currently a Professor at theDepartment of Mechanical Engineering,
Universiti Tenaga Nasional. He received
his PhD from Kanazawa University,Japan in 2006. His research interest includes robotics, mechatronics,
Artificial Intelligence and Machine
Learning.

Mr. Justin Chan Tuck Leong

Mr. Ho Ming Fei
He received his degree in MechanicalEngineering from Universiti Tenaga
Nasional in 2017. He is now working as Production Executive in Perak,Malaysia.

He received his Degree in MechanicalEngineering from Universiti Tenaga
Nasional in 2010.