5. Conclusion and Outlook
The Cable Crawler presented in this paper illustrates a new approach to
robot-performed power line inspections. It could be shown that the required
mobility on slightly inclined cables and mast tops can be achieved with a pure
passive suspension that does not need additional actuators in the robot structure.
Such a relatively simple mechanical structure allows for building cheap and
robust devices – as it is wanted by industry. 8
Future improvements in a final industrial version will mainly stress on the
further reduction of mass (currently 58kg), a better transportability to the mast
top by just one operator and more robustness against rain or snow. The control
software will be implemented on a hardware that is robust enough for any
weather conditions. Also some additional application modules such as automatic
damage detection will be included.