China's first underground intelligent inspection quadruped robot

The four-legged robot is a bionic robot with inspection function developed by the State Net Sea Cable Company. It is nicknamed Electric "Black Back". It has recently completed the first generation inspection work in a 500 kV cable tunnel.

"First show" successfully sprouted cute
   Recently, the little "black back" as soon as I entered the 500 kV Hongyang cable tunnel, I walked four feet into the tunnel deep,
  Sometimes I lift my head up and take a big stride, sometimes I don’t rush, I look around and look around. Sometimes he cranes his neck and stops to stare... Its adorable look, like a fish in water. Again, he seems to be a young man who has released his mood when he sees a new world.

The current position is 500 kV Hongyang Tunnel between No. 4 and No. 5 shafts. The intelligent inspection quadruped robot has a stable attitude and sufficient power. The manipulator and its equipped equipment (infrared, visible light, environmental monitoring sensor) are in normal condition, and the speed is 0.2 meters /Sec, the robotic arm has been raised and switched to the patrol mode of the joint area... In the sprouting that gives the background electric power workers a panoramic view, the "black back" encounters the fire threshold, and easily "hurdles" and walks to the front of the steps. Ability level up.

According to the State Grid Sea Cable Company, "Black Back" has been newly developed. It is the first all-terrain walking four-legged robot used in underground space to realize the functions of unmanned inspection of cable tunnels and cable status detection. The "first show" in the Yang Cable Tunnel smoothly patrolled several fire zones back and forth, successfully fulfilling the requirements of robot patrol on behalf of humans.

Strong limbs and smart mind
   In the view of the State Net Sea Cable Company, this "black back" has "strong torso, vigorous limbs, keen sense of smell, and clever mind". For the high-voltage cables and passages in the tunnel, it has fully intelligent transportation inspection and control functions such as comprehensive health judgment, all-terrain exploration, remote man-machine interaction, and data mining analysis.

Among them, a five-degree-of-freedom manipulator arm that can flexibly retract and rotate freely is equipped with a video sensor, an infrared thermometer and a gas detection sensor. After cleaning, analyzing, reorganizing and sorting out the information monitored by related smart sensors, not only can it form a three-dimensional environment model and terrain probability map, realize navigation planning, autonomous obstacle avoidance and other functions, but also display it on the cable monitoring platform in real time to help Operation and maintenance personnel accurately control the conditions in the cable tunnel, initially achieving full coverage, full identification, abnormal real-time monitoring, and unmanned autonomous inspection. They can also accurately identify faults, alert equipment defects in real time, and effectively assist manual operation and maintenance operations.
  Operation and maintenance personnel can send instruction information in the monitoring center to enable the quadruped robot to automatically patrol according to the preset route, or temporarily change the patrol route according to the on-site situation.

Special tackling key points and opening new games
It is understood that in order to develop the "black back", the State Grid Sea Cable Company established a special research group in 2020, which broke through the technical bottlenecks such as remote control and motion linkage of the quadruped robot, and solved the easy slippage of the quadruped robot during the march , Rollover and other technical problems, combined with the actual needs of the power industry for secondary development and technical iteration.
According to the current testing situation, the "black back" can effectively solve the problem of high personnel operating risks in the confined space of cable tunnels, and manual inspections are difficult to meet the rapid increase in the number of high-voltage cables in the city. It effectively reduces the cost of high-voltage cable lines and passages in the tunnel and improves Transport inspection quality.

State Grid Ocean Cable Company stated that it will continue to promote the integration of advanced information technology and equipment operation inspection business, promote the implementation of typical business scenarios, and realize the transformation from traditional management mode to digital management mode, and the transformation from traditional transportation inspection to digital operation inspection. The transformation has opened up a new situation for the development of "digital, intelligent, and full-informatized" management and control of the cable profession and the promotion of the intelligent development of the power transmission profession.