Autonomous robot for repairs in dangerous surroundings

The device, with a base of six legs and an arm semi-rigid, is oriented to big installations of sectors like the power or the construction and to dangerous surroundings like nuclear head offices or oil platforms.

Some complex industries like the one of the power, with restricted or dangerous surroundings like nuclear head offices or oil platforms, need repairs and maintenance that represent a potential danger for the workers. Others, by the intricate of his design, require of a maintenance in inaccessible places that can not be executed by people. This has contributed a greater degree of difficulty and new needs to the hour to tackle repairs or, simply, to llevar routine works of maintenance.

Thus, a European consortium has set up the project MiRoR, in which it participates IK4-Tekniker beside other seven universities, companies and technology centres in the VII Program Mark of the European Union, to design a robot miniaturizado able to develop tasks of repair and maintenance with a high degree of precision and flexibility.

Given his characteristics, the project MiRoR is designed to apply in sectors that require of big investments. On the one hand, industrial states related with the power, like the nuclear head offices or the plants of extraction equipment equipment of gas and oil. By the another, the big works of civil engineering. Besides, the robot also has application in sectors like the production of big motors to reaction for the aerial sector. Therefore, the project has the participation of big companies like Areva, Acciona, Petrom or Rolls Royce.

Foresees that the project, initiated this year, culminate with the development of the robot in 2015.

The robot is conformed by two robotic systems complementary that confer him a high degree of flexibility. The first consists in a base with six legs with the double capacity to displace of autonomous way as well as to llevar processes of mechanised of precision by means of cinematic. The second system consists in an arm robot semi-rigid, that allows to access to spaces very narrow. Thanks to his system patented to confer rigidity to the segments of the arm, the robotic arm is able to llevar tasks of inspection and mechanised in inaccessible places.

The conjunction of the two systems is controlled by a system of three levels: a control of low level for the processes of mechanised, an intermediate level for the movement of the robot in the surroundings of work and a control of high level that contributes the intelligence to the system.

The intelligent control allows to the robot a wide fan of functions of navigation, like the location and the local and global planning of itineraries, as well as the calibración in the mechanised and the obtaining of an optimum positioning of the legs of the robot.

The robot also is provisto of systems that allow him take decisions on the best way to access to his area of work, as well as his adaptation to the knowledge that obtain in activities of previous work. On the other hand, the robot is endowed of a system of car-protection for situations in which it find in conditions of danger.

For an optimum performance of the robot, the system includes a bank of virtual proofs that allows to identify the best configuration of the device for each industrial surroundings as well as simulate and predict the behaviour of the robot in front of obstacles and unforeseen circumstances.