Technological Watch
The purpose of a technological watch is to identify what is done for our application and to learn more about existing technology or study related to our project.
To make a technological watch we create an excel on a drive and just put information with their sources and date of publishing by using different browser.
In the first time we will extract the context of our project from our studies:
The use of the robot is increasing in the nuclear industry due to nuclear incidents and the obsolescence growing of the different installations. As an example, France has nine nuclear plants in deconstruction.
In this field of activity, the reliability is crucial and no human cost is acceptable. In order to fill the strong exigences established by the nuclear environment, engineers have developed robot either to investigate or decontaminate.
Then we’ll find information about our application :
Our final goal is to design a robot able to cross a pit of 30 cm an to climb steps of 30cm * 30cm, to match this we started by looking for more solution, so we classed the different kind of robots locomotion systems and evaluated them to identify 2 architecture:
The Tracks-Legs hybrid solution is a great solution, and it is the most used one by the past as you can see in thoses examples:
The iRobot Warrior 710 is a robotic platform able to climb steps and slopes at up to 45°. It was used in Fukushima but his electronic failed quickly because it was not designed to the radioactive environment.
EOLE ( Observation and Location Engine in the environment) is a French robot used by INTRA ( Group of Robotic Intervention on Accidents) which is a task force equipped with robots suited to work in a radioactive environment in case of a nuclear crash in France.
Sakura is a robot developed to survey the inside of the
Fukushima nuclear power plant. It is specifically designed
to collect information in the underground, where there is
severe conditions. There, a robot needs to have high
mobility and be able to withstand high radiation levels.
This kind of robots can meet our specifications but we wanted something different, and if possible simpler and cheaper than tracks.
As we've seen before, Wheel-Legs hybrids could meet our specifications too, so we look for some examples and we found two very attractive robots, they are called “SHRIMP” and “MANTIS”.
Mantis
Mantis is a hybrid leg-wheel robot, equipped with two front motorized wheels, a passive rear axle, and two rotating legs. The main design goals are mobility in indoor environments with step climbing capability, pivoting around a vertical axis and without oscillations for stable vision, mobility in unstructured environments, low mechanical and control complexity. We found this one very interesting and you will probably find common ideas with our robot RICA IV
Shrimp
SHRIMP is able to climb stairs and obstacles up to two times the diameter of the wheel, the six wheels allow it to be highly stable in rough terrain. This robot uses a locomotion system based on passive adaptation to the ground.
SHRIMP is excellent at climbing steps and very easy to control, but it would need big improvements to pass the gap, and we think that the high number of pieces will make it harder to manufacture.
20/06/18