Design of a Novel Long-Reach Cable-Driven Hyper-Redundant Snake-like Manipulator for Inspection and Maintenance

Abstract

Robotic inspection and maintenance are gaining importance due to the number of different scenarios in which robots can operate. The use of robotic systems to accomplish such tasks has deep implications in terms of safety for human workers and can significantly extend the life of infrastructures and industrial facilities. In this context, long-reach cable-driven hyper-redundant robots can be employed to inspect areas that are difficult to reach and hazardous environments such as tanks and vessels. This paper presents a novel long-reach cable-driven hyper-redundant robot called SLIM (Snake-Like manipulator for Inspection and Maintenance). SLIM consists of a robotic arm, a pan and tilt mechanism as end-effector, and an actuation box that can rotate and around which the arm can wrap. The robot has a total of 15 degrees of freedom and, therefore, for the task of positioning the tool centre point in a bi-dimensional Cartesian space with a specific attitude, it has 10 degrees of redundancy. The robot is designed to operate in harsh environments and high temperatures and can deploy itself up to about 4.8 m. This paper presents the requirements that drove the design of the robot, the main aspects of the mechanical and electronic systems, the control strategy, and the results of preliminary experimental tests performed with a physical prototype to evaluate the robot performances.

Equivalent Dynamic Analysis of a Cable-Driven Snake Arm Maintainer

“…The main areas to be optimized are as follows: (1) The equivalent friction model of the cable in the circular hole will be developed to identify non-linear friction. (2) The linear elastic deformation model of the cable will be developed to identify the dynamics of flexible errors.…”

“…The following advantages can be achieved: (1) Under the premise of ensuring high spatial curvature and load capacity, the complexity of the drive system and control system is reduced by multiples. (2) The synchronous movement of adjacent joints considerably simplifies the kinematics model, and the inverse kinematics solution is more convenient and quicker.…”

“…A cable-driven snake arm maintainer (SAM) drive unit is generally placed outside of a robot's working space. This placement reduces the number of electronic devices on the entire snake arm, which is highly conducive to remote maintenance tasks in complex and narrow environments, such as nuclear power plants [1][2][3]. The China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is large-scale, international scientific project adopting a remote handing system (RH) for regular monitoring and maintenance [4].…”

Integrated Robotic Arm Control: Inverse Kinematics, Trajectory Planning, and Performance Evaluation for Automated Welding

“…Currently, many industrial manufacturing processes, especially welding, have been replaced by a robot arm. This is indicated by the increase in sales of industrial robots / robotic arms by 12%, namely 178,132 units in 2013 [4] In Japan, the automotive industry requires 1436 robot units per 10,000 workers [5] From these data, it shows that a robot arm plays an important role in an industry. In the field of automatic welding and robotic arms, many researchers have conducted research that is also related to what researchers do, such as those conducted by [6] with the title Design of MIG Welding Motion Automation System to Improve the Quality of Welding Joints.…”

Design of the Crawler Units: Toward the Development of a Novel Hybrid Platform for Infrastructure Inspection

“…Therefore, many specialized robots, [5,6], have been developed to cover these critical components. To accomplish the task, these devices exhibit small-sized and targetoriented designs [7][8][9].…”