Design study of an earthquake rescue robot

This thesis describes the design of a brush robot for earthquake rescue and for traversing pipes with varied cross sectional shape. Earthquake rescue is a very dangerous, difficult and challenging task, in which emergency services rescue people who are trapped in man-made structures, such as collapsed buildings after an earthquake. The building collapse may have been caused by natural or man-made events. This technology is also applicable to tunnel collapse and land slips. The focus of this work is finding the location of victims and provision of primary life support and communications. To illustrate the concept of the robot, the thesis first discusses the current development of rescue robots and pipe robots. Then the thesis focuses on the description of a brush based pipe robot, developed by the University of Durham, which would be used as the basis of an earthquake rescue robot. The concept of the robot was illustrated and compared with other current rescue robots and pipe robots. After outlining the advantages of this robot concept, a robot body shape change theory was proposed and theoretical simulations were used to verily the practicality of the robot shape change theory. The thesis also illustrates the design of the working principle and design of a robot sensor, which was subsequently used in the robot shape change experiments. The robot body shape change experiments and the experimental results are described and discussed. The experimental results illustrate the robot concept and support the robot body shape change theory. Chapter 6 focuses on the brush unit traction investigation, bristle theory and mathematical model. Furthermore, the bristle theory and mathematical model were used to explain the variation of traction force in the traction experiments

Automation and Control Architecture for Hybrid Pipeline Robots

The aim of this research project, towards the automation of the Hybrid Pipeline Robot (HPR), is the development of a control architecture and strategy, based on reconfiguration of the control strategy for speed-controlled pipeline operations and self-recovering action, while performing energy and time management. The HPR is a turbine powered pipeline device where the flow energy is converted to mechanical energy for traction of the crawler vehicle. Thus, the device is flow dependent, compromising the autonomy, and the range of tasks it can perform. The control strategy proposes pipeline operations supervised by a speed control, while optimizing the energy, solved as a multi-objective optimization problem. The states of robot cruising and self recovering, are controlled by solving a neuro-dynamic programming algorithm for energy and time optimization, The robust operation of the robot includes a self-recovering state either after completion of the mission, or as a result of failures leading to the loss of the robot inside the pipeline, and to guaranteeing the HPR autonomy and operations even under adverse pipeline conditions Two of the proposed models, system identification and tracking system, based on Artificial Neural Networks, have been simulated with trial data. Despite the satisfactory results, it is necessary to measure a full set of robot’s parameters for simulating the complete control strategy. To solve the problem, an instrumentation system, consisting on a set of probes and a signal conditioning board, was designed and developed, customized for the HPR’s mechanical and environmental constraints. As a result, the contribution of this research project to the Hybrid Pipeline Robot is to add the capabilities of energy management, for improving the vehicle autonomy, increasing the distances the device can travel inside the pipelines; the speed control for broadening the range of operations; and the self-recovery capability for improving the reliability of the device in pipeline operations, lowering the risk of potential loss of the robot inside the pipeline, causing the degradation of pipeline performance. All that means the pipeline robot can target new market sectors that before were prohibitive