Mobile Monitoring and Maintenance of Power Systems

Deregulation of power industry in the US and energy crisis in some parts of the world put forward formidable challenges that need to be overcome for successful operation of power networks in the new environment. Monitoring of electric power systems in real-time for reliability, aging status, and presence of incipient faults requires distributed processing of vast amounts of data from distributed sensor networks. Solving this formidable task requires cohesive multidisciplinary efforts from such fields as sensing, signal processing, control, communications, optimization theory, and, more recently, robotics. This review paper focuses on one trend of power system monitoring, namely, mobile monitoring. The developments in autonomous and teleoperated robotic maintenance of power systems indicate significant potential of this technological approach. The authors describe several important relevant sensor technologies that are used to monitor power systems.