Abstract
Many heat transfer tubes are distributed on the tube plates of a steam generator that requires periodic inspection by robots. Existing inspection robots are usually involved in issues: Robots with manipulators need complicated installation due to their fixed base; tube mobile robots suffer from low running efficiency because of their structural restricts. Since there are thousands of tubes to be checked, task planning is essential to guarantee the precise, orderly, and efficient inspection process. Most in-service robots check the task tubes using row-by-row and column-by-column planning. This leads to unnecessary inspections, resulting in a long shutdown and affecting the regular operation of a nuclear power plant. Therefore, this paper introduces the structure and control system of a dexterous robot and proposes a task planning method. This method proceeds into three steps: task allocation, base position search, and sequence planning. To allocate the task regions, this method calculates the tool work matrix and proposes a criterion to evaluate a sub-region. And then all tasks contained in the sub-region are considered globally to search the base positions. Lastly, we apply an improved ant colony algorithm for base sequence planning and determine the inspection orders according to the planned path. We validated the optimized algorithm by conducting task planning experiments using our robot on a tube sheet. The results show that the proposed method can accomplish full task coverage with few repetitive or redundant inspections and it increases the efficiency by 33.31% compared to the traditional planning algorithms.
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Abbreviations
- ABC:
-
Artificial bee colony optimization
- ACO:
-
Ant colony optimization
- D–H:
-
Denavit–Hertenbeg
- DoF:
-
Degree-of-freedom
- IK:
-
Inverse kinematics
- NPP:
-
Nuclear power plant
- PSO:
-
Particle swarm optimization
- SG:
-
Steam generator
- TSP:
-
Traveling salesman problem
- a :
-
Rectangular region of width/length
- B Best :
-
Best base position for the current searching region
- B Current :
-
Current base position
- Base(x, y):
-
Distance between the foot toes
- C :
-
Robot rotation speed
- C r :
-
Turning cost
- C w :
-
Translation cost
- d :
-
Distance between two tube holes
- d(cur, next, t):
-
Heuristic cost function
- f(w j, l j, k):
-
Minimum number of tasks to be completed of \({{\cal V}_j}\)
- \({F_{\rm{D}}}({\cal B})\) :
-
Number of different elements in \({\cal B}\)
- Hole(x, y):
-
Distribution of the tube holes
- k :
-
Distance from the foot toe to the tool
- \({\bar l}\) :
-
Length of the unassigned work row
- l j :
-
Length of \({{\cal V}_j}\)
- l max :
-
Maximum length of the region according to the work matrix
- l s :
-
Length of the search row
- \({L_{{\rm{Ant}}}}({\cal B})\) :
-
Total distance of the points in the set \({\cal B}\)
- L Outer :
-
Distribution of the base toes
- L OutertoTool :
-
Distance between the tools
- N(w):
-
Number of completed tasks
- Plug(x, y) :
-
Distribution of the plugging holes
- \([q_{\rm{h}}^1\,\,\,\,q_{\rm{h}}^2\,\,\,\,q_{\rm{h}}^3]\) :
-
Robot joint configuration solution
- R m :
-
Maximum size of the optimal region
- R p :
-
Configuration matrix
- \(R_{\rm{p}}^\prime \) :
-
Intermediate variable to obtain \(R_{\rm{p}}^ * \)
- \(R_{\rm{p}}^ * \) :
-
All matrices that minimize the number of base positions
- S max :
-
Robot maximum translation distance
- t :
-
Number of turns
- T Grasp :
-
Robot releasing time
- T i :
-
Task tube hole
- T pb :
-
Optimal work matrix
- T pl :
-
Length work matrix
- T ps :
-
Suboptimal work matrix
- Task(x, y):
-
Distribution of the task holes
- V Rot :
-
Robot translation speed
- V Trans :
-
Robot grasping time
- V(w):
-
Evaluation function of the main working direction
- w j :
-
Width of \({{\cal V}_j}\)
- (x h, y h):
-
Robot base position solution
- ⌊x⌋:
-
Downward rounding function
- ᾱ :
-
Factor along the length direction
- α 2k :
-
Factor along the width direction
- α 2k−1, α 2k−2, …, α k+1 :
-
Factor of the compound direction
- \({\cal B}\) :
-
Point set containing n base positions
- \({\cal T}\) :
-
Task set
- \({{\cal V}_j}\) :
-
Sub-region
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. U2013214) and the Self-Planned Task of the State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System (HIT), China (Grant No. SKLRS202001A03).
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Xu, B., Zhang, X., Ou, Y. et al. High-efficiency inspecting method for mobile robots based on task planning for heat transfer tubes in a steam generator. Front. Mech. Eng. 18, 25 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11465-022-0741-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11465-022-0741-z