Standards Development

Scope

To study and prepare the draft for Part 3-11: Outdoor Wheeled Inspection Robot System for Substation — General requirement, test methods and acceptance criteria.

This document specifies the system composition, operating environment, functional requirement, performance requirements, test requirements, marking, packaging, transportation, and storage of outdoor wheeled inspection robot system for substations.

Purpose

As a core node connecting the power transmission and distribution network, a substation’s safe and stable operation directly impacts power supply reliability. To ensure the stable operation and maintenance of substations, regular inspections are required to promptly identify potential defects in high-voltage equipment within the station and avoid power outages caused by equipment failures. Traditional inspections in high-voltage areas rely on manual methods, which suffer from low efficiency and long inspection cycles. In addition, manual inspections have higher personal safety risks such as electric shock and mechanical injury. Moreover, differences in inspectors’ subjective judgments or the impact of severe weather can lead to incomplete inspection coverage and poor consistency of inspection results. The emergence of substation inspection robots provides an effective solution to the above problems: through automated movement within the station, multi- dimensional sensor detection and intelligent data analysis, the robot can complete equipment condition monitoring without human intervention. This not only significantly reduces the risk of personnel exposure to hazardous environments, but also enables more comprehensive and accurate collection of equipment operation data, effectively ensuring the safety of operation and maintenance personnel and the quality of inspections.

Over the past few years, the application scale of substation inspection robots has witnessed rapid growth, and they have gradually become a key component of the daily operation and maintenance of substations. Currently, such robots have been widely deployed in multiple countries including the United States, Japan, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada and China, covering the core equipment inspection scenarios of substations with different voltage levels. For example: China began large- scale promotion in 2014, becoming the world’s first country to carry out large-scale application and promotion of such robots. After nearly a decade of development, it has accumulated extensive experience. At present, more than 4,000 units are in operation, with their application scope covering all 31 provinces across the country. The robots are equipped with five major inspection modes including autonomous inspection and special inspection, as well as over 30 functions such as visible light detection and infrared temperature measurement, and the number of manufacturing enterprises has reached more than 100. In New Zealand, a remote-controlled robot has been developed for equipment inspection in substations. Equipped with cameras and a software system, the robot can perform routine inspections of substation equipment. In Tokyo, Japan, a company has developed a robot for substation inspection, which is mainly used to detect abnormal oil leakage phenomena under substations.

However, the lack of unified functional requirements, technical specifications and relevant testing and verification methods has led to significant differences in the typical functions, performance, evaluation methods and acceptance criteria of substation robots across different countries. These differences have increased the difficulty of user selection and operation and maintenance costs, and also restricted the large-scale application of robots in substations.

This document specifies the general requirements, test methods and acceptance criteria for substation inspection robot systems. By systematically defining the core composition architecture (robot, monitoring system, auxiliary facilities), key functional modules (detection, navigation, communication, emergency safety, etc.) and core performance (environmental adaptability, motion reliability, data accuracy, etc.) of such systems, it establishes a complete product specification for substation inspection robots. This ensures that such products meet the operation and maintenance requirements related to substation inspection, and provides technical support for the standardized development of unmanned substation operation and maintenance in the context of the global smart grid.