By decreasing the maintenance cost and increasing the service life, the ideal power network can be approached along with reliability of existing power networks. Mobile monitoring is one of them and it involves development of a robotic platform by carrying a sensor array.

It continuously patrols the power cable network and helpful in locating efficient features. It can also estimate the aging status of electrical insulation. The task of monitoring the electric power systems in the real time for the purpose of reliability as well as aging status and presence of sufficient features, there is a necessity of distributed and centralized processing of large amount of data from the distributed sensor network.

The mobile monitoring of power systems involves the following problems:

Sensor Fusion: The non destructive miniature sensors are capable of determining the status of power cable systems in the robotic platforms which are developed and integrated into the monitoring system. It also includes a video sensor for performing visual inspection, an infrared partial thermal sensor in order to detect the hot spots along with an acoustic sensor to identify the partial discharge activities.

Motion Patters: The inspection robots which are being used in power systems can be further subdivided into the external and internal ones as external robots are able to travel over the out surface of cables and it can also process the efficient autonomy. On the other hand, the internal robots can travel in the inner spaces of ducts and pipes which are often implemented as following devices. The selection of the motion patterns is determined on the basis of their complexities and autonomy level.

Power supply: As the network of the cable is a global distributed system, so the task of drawing a power cord is very limiting for the inspection robot behind itself. Generally the power supply has to be wireless and that’s why it is expected that the platform can harvest energy from energized cables. In order to wireless power supply, the inductive coupling could be a desired method.

Control Strategy: It deals with object tracking, problem solving and prevention of the electrical short circuits as it receives initial commands from the operator for the global tasks which are often pre-programmed. The control should be robust due to the complicated motion requirements and irregular surface of the cable connections.

Signal Processing Strategies: The main goal of the signal processing is to determine the fault type, extent and aging status so that estimation can be given to help the decision on maintenance. The robot requires computational resources in order to be adaptive and flexible.