A Novel Gripper Prototype for Helical Bird Diverter Manipulation

Energy grids represent a fundamental infrastructure of any country. These structures consist of many kilometres of power lines that must be periodically inspected and maintained. Among the necessary operations are installing and removing bird diverters to reduce bird strikes on power lines. These devices are intended to improve birds’ detection of power lines and reduce the risk of collision. Often, the installation and removal of bird diverters from power lines is accomplished by humans operating from helicopters or directly on the power lines. Apart from the considerable cost of these operations, working in elevated environments creates human safety risks. To reduce these risks, this paper proposes a novel solution to automatize these tasks. The proposed solution is a prototype gripper that can be mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and remotely operated to install or remove bird diverters. This work presents a mechatronic device and software architecture system that is experimentally evaluated in a laboratory mock-up, which consists of a manipulator equipped with the proposed tool for removing a bird diverter. Future work is needed to deploy the proposed tool on a UAV.