3 ms·
How well does it tolerate lateral winds? My impression of the power lines in my area is that the top wire is just structural. I could imagine something (light
by __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
How well does it tolerate lateral winds?
My impression of the power lines in my area is that the top wire is just structural. I could imagine something (lighter than air or not) crawling along it rather than floating free. Of course you'd need to only do that if you knew that the additional drag wouldn't subsequently damage the thing you're inspecting, but since you're an inspection company, that kind of assessment shouldn't be too hard.
- ThomasLaporte 3y agoConcerning wind effects, we aim to operate with winds up to 10m/s (we did 8,5m/s last week so it's going well!). If the winds are higher we will wait it out (exactly like other aircrafts do ie drones and helicopter in certain cases). There are actually some startups working on robots that would hang/crawl from the lines. But, I feel like our clients like the "remote sensing" capacities and are not very much interested with (or even are afraid of) things touching their assets.
- hedora 3y agoYou could probably run a robot along the high voltage lines (birds sit on them all the time), but I imagine the main problem is jumping from segment to segment when you reach a pole (partially because you might accidentally ground the robot, but mostly because acrobatics are hard, especially if you're tangled up in tree limbs, etc).
- ThomasLaporte 3y agoYeah going from one pylone's side to another will be hard. Especially because the components are quite fragile (like insulators).