title: Energy-efficient control of a screw-drive pipe robot with consideration of actuator's characteristics.
abstract: Pipe robots can perform inspection tasks to alleviate the damage caused by the pipe problems. Usually, the pipe robots carry batteries or use a power cable draining power from a vehicle that has many equipments for exploration. Nevertheless, the energy is limited for the whole inspection task and cannot keep the inspection time too long. In this paper, we use the total input energy as the cost function and a more accurate DC motor model to generate an optimal energy-efficient velocity control for a screw-drive pipe robot to make use of the limited energy in field environment. We also propose a velocity selection strategy that includes the actual velocity capacity of the motor, according to the velocity ratio [Formula: see text], to keep the robot working in safe region and decrease the energy dissipation. This selection strategy considers three situations of the velocity ratio [Formula: see text] and has a wide range of application. Simulations are conducted to compare the proposed method with the sinusoidal control and loss minimization control (minimization of copper losses of the motor), and results are discussed in this paper.
authors.affiliation: School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School, ShenZhen, 518055 China ; Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong China.
authors.forename: Peng
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110016 China ; Department of Robotics, Ritsumeikan University, Shiga-ken, 525-8577 Japan.
authors.forename: Shugen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong China.
authors.forename: Congyi
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lyu
authors.affiliation: School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen Graduate School, ShenZhen, 518055 China.
authors.forename: Xin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong China.
authors.forename: Yunhui
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
keywords: Energy-efficient control; In-pipe robot; Optimal velocity strategy