The intelligent robot of China Southern Power Grid Guangdong Company began to "work" in the high-voltage substation

China Southern Power Grid Guangdong Company recently announced that its intelligent patrol robot developed by it was put into use, which is expected to achieve 24-hour monitoring of the substation, which will improve the intelligent level of the power system. The first robot put into use began to "go to work" at the Yunfu 500kV Wolong substation of Guangdong Power Grid on November 4.

Yang Yingyi, head of the artificial intelligence technology group of the robotics division of the Guangdong Energy Technology Company of China Southern Power Grid, said that the robot would automatically perform relevant line detection and data reading, replacing the traditional manual inspection, by setting the inspection point and route in advance and issuing the inspection task with a button in the main control room.

Patrol inspection is an important guarantee for the operation safety of the substation, which is divided into routine patrol inspection and special patrol inspection. Routine inspections vary from once a month or once a quarter; For special patrol inspection, the more frequent cycle is set according to the specific needs, such as the patrol inspection in the special power supply period is required to be conducted once a day. There are more than 1000 inspection points involved in a substation, which usually takes two workers six or seven working hours to complete.

"With the rapid development of the economy, the scale of the power grid is becoming larger and larger, the number of power transmission and transformation equipment is also increasing, and the contradiction between the inspection demand and manpower is becoming more and more prominent. How to improve the level of intelligence and reduce the investment of manpower has become a new challenge to ensure the security of power supply," Yang Yingyi said.

In recent years, robots have been introduced into the field of electric power inspection, replacing manual work to complete part of automatic inspection. However, due to the influence of complex background, light conditions and other factors, the traditional image recognition methods for instrument recognition have low detection and reading accuracy.

"The newly developed intelligent inspection robot uses AI algorithm to greatly improve the accuracy of equipment image recognition. Because the robot inspection is limited by time, weather and other factors, it makes it possible for the substation robot to achieve 24-hour all-day monitoring." Yang Yingyi said,

Yang Yingyi believes that the promotion, application and empowerment of intelligent inspection robots can effectively promote the unmanned development of substation inspection. In the future, intelligent robots will continue to be applied to the inspection of transmission lines to promote the intelligence of power inspection, which will also help improve the level of power security in the Greater Bay Area of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao.