Mobile Observation Point Calculation and Meter Reading Based on the Digital Twin Model of Substations

With the development of the power system, the number of substation equipment continues to increase, and the use of intelligent mobile robots to replace traditional manual inspection methods is a trend, which can improve inspection efficiency and stability, and reduce the operation and maintenance costs of substations. However, in the current mobile robot inspection process, to ensure that meter readings are not affected by factors such as lighting and the observation angle of the gimbal, operators need to pre-adjust the corresponding observation points for each device to be observed, resulting in a significant workload for debugging. To reduce the extensive debugging time invested by staff in the early stages, this paper proposes a method for robot meter reading without preset positions based on a digital twin model of the substation. The positions of equipment are marked in the digital twin model and sent to the mobile robot, which then calculates the optimal observation route autonomously. An RGBD camera is used to obtain the point cloud of the meter, and the normal vectors of the point cloud are extracted to calculate the corresponding optimal observation position and gimbal angle. Subsequently, image processing methods are employed to obtain the meter reading. Finally, the experiment results show that the proposed method can reduce the workload of manual debugging in substation inspection and improve the stability and accuracy of meter readings.