It travels like a sloth, hanging upside-down. It does an alley-oop around poles/insullators to continue on. It inspects the line as it travels by taking video and measuring its instantaneous slope -- correlating that with its GPS postion. It detects branches or other obstructions on or in close proximity to the line. It will use either a simple FM modem (to co-operative data-collectors) or cellular wireless to phone home and report. Maybe we can figure out how it can dump data by induction into the power lines.

The curvature of a free-hanging line is a catenary, and is important for the line in supporting weather loads, expansion, and contraction.

It will probably piss off birds and squirrels ...

I'm kind of wrapped around the BuckyBot axle right now, but some of BuckyBot will be spun into the SlothBot