A Roadmap for Automated Power Line Inspection. Maintenance and Repair

Electrical power companies usually perform regular visual inspection to check the status of their transmission lines mainly using helicopter equipped with external gimbals housing infrared and ultraviolet camera to detect hot spots and corona discharges. This solution is quite expensive, dangerous for the crew and not very reliable. Focus of this paper is, presenting the state of the art of the most important current projects concerning the two main categories of robots offering a solution of automation, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and rolling on wires robots (RWR), to create a simple roadmap that can guide researchers and industries in the implementation of a “FULLY AUTOMATED LIVE LINE POWER LINE INSPECTION CONCEPT”: a rigorous live line inspection strategy based on a completely autonomous mobile platform capable of a meaningful payload and a power line data management system including specific tool for image and signal data processing to automatically detect defects or abnormal conditions.