Research On The Control System Of A Underwater Crawling Robot Used In Nuclear Power Plant

Nuclear reactor and the place above the spent fuel pools contains with high levels ofradioactivity, in order to insure the safety of the maintenance staff, Therefore, thedevelopment of a crawl robot with the function, adapting to the high radiation, narrowspace and boric acid environment; salvaging a variety of foreign bodies (including bolts,nuts, magnetic cards and other mechanical debris, etc.); video observation, etc. isnecessary.This paper takes the National863Project "Development of Underwater CrawlingRobot Used in Nuclear Power Plant"(NO.2011AA040201) as the background, using theU.S. NI CompactRIO controller as the mainly control body, designed a robotic monitoringand controlling system which takes the control mode that using IPC and CompactRIO ascontrol center above water, CAN bus driver and DC servo motor as the executive body.And it has completed the program development based on Windows and LabVIEW tocontrol the underwater crawling robot used in nuclear power plant to realize its basicfunctions.The body structure of the underwater crawling robot used in nuclear power plant wasanalyzed in this paper, and the calculation of the manipulator positive/inverse kinematicsequations was completed using D-H method,its correctness was verified by the simulationin MATLAB; The overall structure and working principle of the robot control system wasintroduced here, and the hardware form and performance of the major components aredescribed here; Then, the large multi-tasking cycle software architecture designed byLabVIEW was described and the development of the motion control system program basedon CANopen communication protocol as well as the entire computer program of the controlsystem was introduced too.Finally, as necessary, the entire control system was debugged and run, and a series offoreign-body-crawling trials were completed. During the test, the entire system runs well,the robot can realize a series of actions such as foreign bodies searching, crawling andplacing, etc. and complete the task efficiently, which verified the effectiveness of thesoftware and hardware of the system.