Mohamed Tahir Shoani, Mohamed Najib Ribuan and Ahmad 'Athif Mohd Faudzi
The current methods for inspecting tall or deep structures such as towers, chimneys, silos, and wells suffer from certain constraints. Manual and assisted inspection methods…
Abstract
Purpose
The current methods for inspecting tall or deep structures such as towers, chimneys, silos, and wells suffer from certain constraints. Manual and assisted inspection methods including humans, drones, wall climbing robots, and others are either costly, have a limited operation time, or affected by field conditions, such as temperature and radiation. This study aims to overcome the presented challenges through a teleoperated soft continuum manipulator capable of inspecting tall or deep structures with high resolution, an unlimited operation time and the ability to use different arms of the manipulator for different environments and structure sizes.
Design/methodology/approach
The teleoperated manipulator uses one rotary and two tendon actuators to reach and inspect the interior of a tall (or deep) structure. A sliding part along the manipulator’s body (arm constrainer and tendon router) induces a variable-length bending segment, allowing an inspection camera to be placed at different distances from the desired location.
Findings
The experiments confirmed the manipulator’s ability to inspect different locations in the structure’s interior. The manipulator also demonstrated a submillimeter motion resolution vertically and a 2.5 mm per step horizontally. The inspection time of the full structure was 48.53 min in the step-by-step mode and was calculated to be 4.23 min in the continuous mode.
Originality/value
The presented manipulator offers several design novelties: the arm’s thin-wide cross-section, the variable-length bending segment in a fixed-length body, the external rolling tendon routing and the ability to easily replace the arm with another of different material or dimensions to suite different structures and environments.
Details
Keywords
Ahmad ‘Athif Mohd Faudzi, Khairuddin Osman, Mohd Fua'ad Rahmat, Koichi Suzumori, Nu'man Din Mustafa and Muhammad Asyraf Azman
Intelligent pneumatic actuator (IPA) is a new generation of actuator developed for Research and Development (R&D) purposes in the academic and industrial fields. The purpose of…
Abstract
Purpose
Intelligent pneumatic actuator (IPA) is a new generation of actuator developed for Research and Development (R&D) purposes in the academic and industrial fields. The purpose of this paper is to show the application of optical encoder and pressure sensor in IPA, to develop a real-time model similar to the existing devices, and to assess the position control performance using a proportional-integrative (PI) controller and a bang-bang controller in real-time.
Design/methodology/approach
A micro optical encoder chip is used to detect cylinder rod position by reading constructed laser stripes on a guide rod, whereas a pressure sensor is used to detect the chamber pressure reading. To control the cylinder movements by manipulating pulse-width modulation (PWM) cycles, two unit valves of two ports and two positions were used. A PI controller and a bang-bang controller are used with suitable gain value to drive the valve using PWM to achieve the target actuator position.
Findings
The results show the experimental results of the closed-loop position tracking performance of the system using a data acquisition (DAQ) card over MATLAB software.
Originality/value
This paper presents a real-time model used to replace the microcontroller-based system from previous IPA design. The paper proposes two control strategies, PI and bang-bang, to control position using encoder and pressure reading.