Design and control of a tracked robot for search and rescue in nuclear power plant

摘要

Environment in some special areas of nuclear power plant is very bad, and is even worse and inaccessible after a nuclear accident. Therefore, a robot developed for special occasions of nuclear plant operation is urgently needed. Different from ordinary robots, nuclear industry robots face even worse environments, such as high radiation, high temperature, high pressure, narrow space, slopes, stairs, and complicated pipeline. This paper designs a tracked mobile robot for search and rescue in nuclear plant. Stair climbing performance of the robot is analyzed. Hardware and software of the control system are designed, and the human-computer interaction interface is developed. Dynamic model of the robot is established, and the trajectory tracking control algorithm of the robot is presented. Finally, simulation experiments using Octave software are finished. Simulation results show that the proposed control algorithm could enable the tracked robot to achieve excellent trajectory tracking of linear and cambered path, and the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified.