Kinematics Analysis of a Manipulator for the Power Transmission Line Maintenance Robot

With the remarkable development of the power grid, traditional manual maintenance modes cannot meet the requirement of efficiency and reliability. Robotic technology is applied for power line maintenance to bring down risks and ensure inspectors' safety. Based on the power transmission line maintenance platform, a 5-DOF manipulator is designed to perform the maintenance tasks for the quad bundle conductors. Then the kinematics analysis of the manipulator is analyzed. The manipulator doesn't meet the Pieper criterion. So an improved adaptive particle swarm optimization (APSO) is proposed for figuring out the inverse kinematics. The weights of the pose and the constraint of the prismatic joint are introduced to the algorithm. What's more, half of the particles are initialized around the incipient value of joints and half of the particles are randomly initialized with the constraint of joints in this algorithm. Results show that the manipulator is able to work in the environment of quad bundle conductors and the proposed algorithm can improve the precision of inverse kinematics and prevent the leap of joints.