Work Condition Monitoring for Knife-Edge Switches on Lightweight Edge Devices.

With the rapid development of smart factories, it is necessary to provide lightweight and real-time working condition monitoring for remote facility sensors to reduce labor costs and ensure safe operation. In the high-voltage power grid scenario, it is crucial to detect the working state of the electric knife-edge switch, i.e., the switch's rotation angle in 3D space, which controls the on-off state of the high-voltage lines. However, existing solutions are mainly in a contact way, which is easy to cause accidents in high risk scenarios such as high-voltage transmission lines. In this paper, we propose EdgeMonitor, a contactless monitoring system for knife-edge switches, which can provide robust and real-time working state detection based on lightweight edge devices. EdgeMonitor includes a lightweight edge device, a monocular camera, and an inertial sensor. Specifically, we propose a lightweight two-stage strategy first to extract the switch's feature information, then perform continuous state tracking for the switch's rotation angle in 3D space. Experiment results show that EdgeMonitor achieves the knife-edge switches detection error within 2.5 degrees with a latency of less than 50ms.