Abstract
Recently, numerous wall-climbing robots have been developed for petrochemical tank maintenance. However, most of them are difficult to be widely applied due to common problems such as poor adsorption capacity, low facade adaptability, and low detection accuracy. In order to realize automatic precise detection, an innovative wall-climbing robot system was designed. Based on magnetic circuit optimization, a passive adaptive moving mechanism that can adapt to the walls of different curvatures was proposed. In order to improve detection accuracy and efficiency, a flexible detection mechanism combining with a hooke hinge that can realize passive vertical alignment was designed to meet the detection requirements. Through the analysis of mechanical models under different working conditions, a hierarchical control system was established to complete the wall thickness and film thickness detection. The results showed that the robot could move safely and stably on the facade, as well as complete automatic precise detection.
Highlights
With the rapid development of industries, an increasing number of spherical and cylindrical tanks have been used to store industrial products in the petrochemical field
Developing a reliable and flexible wall-climbing robot has become a hot spot in the field of tank maintenance, as such a robot can realize the high precision detection of different detection modules under high risk and in complex petrochemical tanks [6,7,8,9,10]
A flexible detection mechanism was designed in accordance with the operational requirements of the different detection modules by integrating rope pulling and a hooke hinge mechanism to realize the self-adaptive vertical alignment of the probe to adapt to different detection techniques
Summary
With the rapid development of industries, an increasing number of spherical and cylindrical tanks have been used to store industrial products in the petrochemical field. Wen [23] proposed an adjustable variable magnetic adsorption mechanism to realize the stability detection of a robot on the outer walls of storage tanks. Many research institutions have developed a large number of wall-climbing robots for industrial applications based on the above adsorption mechanisms by combining mobile mechanisms and detection methods. Huang et al [29] designed a crawler robot for ship detection by integrating a caterpillar structure and the magnetic adsorption mechanism that could realize the large-area detection of complex walls. Different from the traditional wall climbing mechanism with rigid connection, the wheels in this paper were flexibly connected with the moving mechanism to form a pseudopodia robot that could adapt to curved surfaces and move flexibly on the surfaces of spherical and cylindrical storage tanks.
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