China Southern Power Grid Guangdong Company recently announced that its intelligent inspection robot has been put into use, which is expected to achieve 24-hour monitoring of substations, which will improve the intelligent level of the power system. The first robot put into use has started "going to work" on November 4 at the 500 kV Wolong substation of Guangdong Power Grid.

Yang Yingyi, head of the artificial intelligence technology team of the robot division of Guangdong Energy Technology Company of China Southern Power Grid, said that only the inspection point and inspection route need to be set in advance, and the inspection task is issued with one click in the main control room, and the robot will automatically carry out relevant line detection and data reading, replacing the traditional manual inspection.

Inspection is an important guarantee for the operation safety of substations, which is divided into routine inspection and special inspection. Regular inspections vary from once a month or once a quarter; Special inspections, on the other hand, set more frequent cycles according to specific needs, such as inspections required once a day during special power supply periods. A substation involves more than 1,000 patrol points, which usually takes two staff members six or seven man-hours to complete, which is time-consuming and laborious.

"With the rapid development of the economy, the scale of the power grid is getting bigger and bigger, the number of power transmission and transformation equipment is also increasing, and the contradiction between inspection needs 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 power inspection, replacing manual completion of some automated inspection work. However, the traditional image recognition method for instrument recognition is affected by complex background, light conditions and other factors, and the detection and reading accuracy is low.

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

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