Power Line Robot History and Where ABB Robots Fit

How the power line robot grew from hot sticks and barehand crews to LineScout and the live-line robots on Chinese grids, and where ABB robots could fit in.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/13/20265 min read

A power line robot does the jobs linemen used to do by hand on wires that are still carrying current: stripping insulation, fitting clamps, installing grounding rings, cutting back trees. Switching a line off for every repair means outages for homes and factories, so utilities have long repaired lines while they stay live, with a lineman inches from thousands of volts. This post covers how live-line work was done with hot sticks and gloves, the first teleoperated robots in Japan and Canada, the live-line robots now spreading across Chinese grids, and where ABB robots could fit.

Two linesmen in yellow jackets in a raised bucket use a long red insulated pole on overhead wires
Two linesmen in yellow jackets in a raised bucket use a long red insulated pole on overhead wires

Country Energy linesmen in an insulated bucket close a circuit with a hot stick in New South Wales, 2009. Photo: Bidgee / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How linemen learned to work on live wires

For the first decades of electrification, a line crew climbed the pole with spikes and a belt, and the safest repair was the one done after the power was switched off. Photos from rural electrification projects in the 1930s show crews raising poles and stringing wire by hand from the back of a truck. Once more customers depended on the same line, cutting it for a repair became expensive, and utilities started looking for ways to keep it energized while people worked on it.

Black and white photo of a man up a wooden pole while a crew and a truck wait on the road below
Black and white photo of a man up a wooden pole while a crew and a truck wait on the road below

A rural electrification crew at work on a pole in Alabama, 1935. Photo: TVA Web Team / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The answer was the hot stick, an insulated pole that lets a lineman handle a live conductor from a safe distance. Hot sticks appeared in the 1910s, made of baked wood, and were used for jobs such as replacing fuses and insulators. In the late 1950s fibreglass poles arrived, which neither split nor soaked up rainwater, so crews could use them at the highest voltages. Barehand methods, where the worker is bonded to the line's own voltage and handles it directly from an insulated platform or even a helicopter, were first used in 1960.

Two smiling linemen in hard hats on a steel tower arm next to a long string of insulators
Two smiling linemen in hard hats on a steel tower arm next to a long string of insulators

Seattle City Light linemen high on a transmission tower beside its insulator strings, 1952. Photo: Seattle Municipal Archives / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

At the end of the 1980s Japanese utilities built teleoperated systems for distribution lines up to 6.6 kV, and Kyushu Electric ended up with more of these units in service than anyone else. In Canada, Hydro-Québec's research institute IREQ built two hydraulic robots run from a cabin on top of a boom for 25 kV lines. After the 1998 ice storm, IREQ started the LineScout project, a robot that rides along high voltage transmission lines, and it has been used on energized conductors since 2006.

White Unimog truck in a field with a tall white insulated boom raised toward overhead lines
White Unimog truck in a field with a tall white insulated boom raised toward overhead lines

A Unimog fitted with an insulated aerial device for work on live 11,000 volt overhead lines, 2017. Photo: Bimbles / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

China puts live-line robots on the street

China has moved fastest. In January 2020 State Grid put live working robots into service in 10 power supply units in Tianjin on a pilot basis, and the city agreed to host a base to develop and build them. By July 2020 a smaller second generation had done more than 80 jobs in urban, suburban and mountain areas, and the Tianjin base could turn out 200 robots a year. In Xinjiang, State Grid has used live-line robots since July 2022 to trim trees growing into power corridors without cutting the supply.

Worker in dark overalls and orange helmet standing on a steel frame between tall white insulators
Worker in dark overalls and orange helmet standing on a steel frame between tall white insulators

A lineman fitting a high voltage insulator, the kind of hands on job live-line robots are built to take over. Photo: 220v-elektrik / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

In January 2026 a crew in Tianshui, Gansu, used a remotely controlled robot to strip insulation and install grounding rings on a live 10 kV line. China Daily reported that it fitted a set of rings in 25 minutes, against about 60 minutes by hand, and that the same technology is in use at 26 provincial and municipal power companies. On 24 September 2026 China Daily quoted Wang Yuepeng, an engineer at State Grid's Changping branch in Beijing, saying the intelligent live-line working robots his team developed "have been applied widely."

Small figure of a lineman standing on high voltage cables against a grey cloudy sky
Small figure of a lineman standing on high voltage cables against a grey cloudy sky

A lineman walks a conductor bundle of the Ethiopia Kenya 500 kV HVDC line under construction. Photo: Rod Waddington / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

ABB does not build live-line robots, and no source links its arms to one. ABB's ties to the grid are elsewhere. At ABB Smart Power's switchgear plant in Vaasa, Finland, integrator JOT Automation built an assembly line with 20 ABB industrial robots that makes eight switchgear models without changing tools. A power line robot needs the same things ABB already sells in factories: precise arms such as the GoFa CRB 15000 with its Ultra Accuracy feature, safety functions like SafeMove, and offline programming in RobotStudio. Whether ABB arms ever go up in a bucket truck is an open question.

White ABB robot arm working above a conveyor with parts on a pallet inside an assembly cell
White ABB robot arm working above a conveyor with parts on a pallet inside an assembly cell

An ABB robot in a cell on the switchgear assembly line JOT Automation built for ABB Smart Power in Vaasa, Finland. Photo: ABB

What still keeps linemen on the pole

The Chinese robots already use cameras, 3D reconstruction of the scene and path planning, but an operator on the ground still supervises each move, and utilities want robots that can recognise the hardware on a pole, plan the job and do it with the operator only approving. Drones are already common for spotting faults on lines, and the obvious next pairing is a drone that finds the problem and a robot arm that fixes it.

Engineer holding a teach pendant beside a white ABB GoFa cobot arm over a grey table
Engineer holding a teach pendant beside a white ABB GoFa cobot arm over a grey table

Programming an ABB GoFa cobot with Ultra Accuracy, ABB's high precision path feature. Photo: ABB

For factories the change will be in what they build. State Grid Tianshui has said it plans to use its robot on more high risk jobs after the first one in January. Live-line robots need insulated booms, tool changers and grippers for clamps and grounding rings, all made in volume if the Chinese numbers spread to other countries. That is assembly and testing work that factory robots already handle, much like the ABB line in Vaasa. Readers who want to see how a cell like that is planned can start with our list of ABB robot use cases.

Long row of glass walled robot cells with ABB arms and conveyors in a bright factory hall
Long row of glass walled robot cells with ABB arms and conveyors in a bright factory hall

Robot cells on ABB Smart Power's automated switchgear line in Vaasa, Finland. Photo: ABB

A robot on a live line must be insulated from the conductor, the truck and the operator at once, and every new tool adds a path for current. Rain, ice, wind and darkness are when lines fail and when robots struggle most, which is why LineScout's designers started with an ice storm. Linemen also need new skills, because operating and maintaining a robot is a different job from working the line by hand. In the Tianshui job the robot handled the stripping and the grounding rings while the crew stayed on the ground. Getting from that split to a robot that works the whole job alone is the problem the next decade has to solve.

Trainees in yellow hard hats and climbing belts working on several wooden poles in a field
Trainees in yellow hard hats and climbing belts working on several wooden poles in a field

Seattle City Light apprentices practise pole climbing during lineworker training, 2004. Photo: Seattle Municipal Archives / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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