China Southern Power Grid Guangdong company announced recently that its intelligent inspection robot has been put into use, which is expected to realize 24-hour monitoring of substation, which will improve the intelligent level of power system. The first robot to be put into use started working in Yunfu 500kV Wolong substation of Guangdong power grid on November 4.

Yang Yingyi, leader of the artificial intelligence technology group of the robot business department of Guangdong energy technology company of China Southern Power Grid, said that as long as the inspection points and inspection routes are set in advance, and the inspection task is issued in the main control room with one key, the robot will automatically carry out relevant line detection and data reading, replacing the traditional manual inspection.

Patrol inspection is an important guarantee of substation operation safety, which is divided into routine inspection and special inspection. Routine inspection is conducted once a month or once a quarter, while special inspection is set more frequently according to specific requirements, such as once a day in special power supply guarantee period. A substation involves more than 1000 inspection points, which usually requires two workers to complete six or seven working hours, which is time-consuming and laborious.

"With the rapid economic development, the scale of the power grid is becoming larger and larger, and the number of power transmission and transformation equipment is also increasing, and the contradiction between inspection demand and manpower is becoming more and more prominent. How to improve the level of intelligence and reduce manpower investment 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 to replace manual inspection. However, due to the influence of complex background, light conditions and other factors, the traditional image recognition method for instrument recognition has low detection and reading accuracy.

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

Yang Yingyi believes that the popularization and application of intelligent inspection robot and enhancement of empowerment can effectively promote the development of unmanned substation inspection. In the future, we will continue to apply intelligent robots to power transmission line inspection and so on, so as to promote the intelligence of power inspection, which will also help to improve the power security level of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao Bay area