Watch: Kiwi made robots helping get rural power restored after big storms

Transpower is trialling robots to help restore rural power after big storms.

The idea behind the mechanical workers is to cut down on the time it takes to fix a rural outage.

"Some of our workers are three to four hours away from our rural sites. So the idea behind the robot is that it can be based on site, and in an outage situation it can be livened up immediately from our control rooms remotely," Transpower's Mark Ryall says.

The robots were created by graduate students from Massey University.

TVNZ1's Seven Sharp sent Tim Wilson along to meet the robots and put them through their paces in the video above.