Design of an autonomous robot system for oil sampling in ultra-high voltage substation

The transformer oil, which plays an insulating role, will deteriorate due to the long-term work of the transformer, thus reducing the insulation performance. Therefore, it’s important to conduct regular sampling and inspection of the transformer oil The transformers in the substation are widely distributed which makes manual sampling time-consuming and costly. An autonomous oil sampling robot system is designed for ultra-high voltage (UHV) substations to address the problem. The system mainly includes mobile platform, underlying control module, autonomous navigation module, robot arm grasping module and target identification module. After completing the development of the above modules, the autonomous oil sampling robot system can complete autonomous movement and sampling in the UHV substation. The system’s repeat positioning accuracy of navigation is about 12cm, and the detection and recognition rate of key objects is about 99.96%, which can be widely used in the task of talking oil samples in UHV substations.