Design And Realization Of Autonomous Inspection System For Gas Leakage In Chemical Plant

As one of the products of artificial intelligence, robot has been applied to various fields. The fast development of moving robot has promoted the automation and intellectualization of modern production and life. Wheel robot belongs to moving robot and it has brief structure and is of high mobility. Moreover it can be operated very conveniently. Especially, wheel robot can be used in environment where people are not able to reach. The surroundings of chemical plant are very complex and leakage inspection of poisonous and harmful gas is one of the most important tasks of chemical plant. Conventional manual inspection mainly relies on the senses and experiences of workers and this method is inaccurate. For chemical plant, once the gas leakage is not detected in time, the health and even lives of workers are greatly threatened by poisonous and harmful gas. The application of intelligent vehicle for autonomous inspection can easily avoid the above problems. Robot inspection combines the technology of single chip microcomputer control, wireless communication, video monitoring and Internet communication. Through robot inspection, equipment can be inspected autonomously and operators are able to take measures timely and efficiently. Furthermore the health and life safety of inspection workers can be guaranteed.In this paper, a system of autonomous inspection intelligent vehicle for gas leakage in chemical plant is designed. This system is able to display the gas density value and the corresponding variation curve. Besides moving objects of chemical scene can be detected. Main design contents of the system include the hardware construction, the software programming and the experiment test. System hardware is made up of the following parts:controller, sensors, wireless data transmission module, IP camera, battery and the vehicle. The software section includes PC interface and the controller program. The PC interface is designed using VB 6.0 and its functions include vehicle motion control, gas density value display and gas variation curve. The controller program is completed in Arduino IDE to realize the reception of PC command, motion of the vehicle, data detection and transmission of sensors. Besides IP camera is used to monitor the scene video.After several experiments, the system designed is able to receive commands from PC and send data detected by sensors to PC via wireless data transmission module. The scene video is transmitted to PC using IP camera through WiFi. Experiment results demonstrate that the system designed can be used to monitor gas leakage remotely and inspect the plant autonomously.