Attitude and Position Estimation for a Power Line Inspection Robot

This paper presents the design of a state estimator for fusing sensor data on a power line inspection robot to obtain position and attitude estimates. The approach taken is a loose coupling of global positioning system (GPS) data with inertial measurement unit (IMU) data and joint angle measurements. The fact that robot is constrained to be on a span is used to reduce the number of degrees of freedom. In this application, a magnetometer cannot provide useful measurement of the earth's magnetic field for attitude estimation because of the proximity to high current carrying transmission lines.