Power Pole Challenge

I spent several hours today studying photographs of power poles. I am working with a client to help improve a robot used to crawl along a live conductor while helically wrapping it with a fiber optic cable. The autonomous robot will significantly reduce the cost of expanding internet access, especially in remote areas of the world. Crawling along the power line is the easy part. Traversing the insulators at each pole is the tricky bit. Just when I have imagined a morphology that I believe will address the challenge, I come across a new insulator arrangement that cannot be traversed. I am nothing if relentless and will continue to iterate on design concepts until I have something better than the existing implementation.