Intelligent Inspection Robot For Thermal Power Plants

At present,the inspections in the workshops of thermal power plants in China are mostly conducted by people,and the environment in the workshops has led to a significant impact on people’s physical health due to long-term work.In order to reduce the amount of labor and body injury,this paper designs an intelligent patrol robot based on the Mecanum wheel car.According to the functional requirements of the working condition,it analyzes and studies the robot’s synchronous positioning and mapping(SLAM),path planning navigation,intelligent voice interaction and other algorithms,and completes the design of the robot’s software and hardware.The inspection road conditions and functional requirements of the thermal power plant are analyzed,the size and functions of the intelligent inspection robot are determined,the overall system structure,hardware selection and hardware structure of the inspection robot are built according to the functional requirements,and the kinematics model,TF coordinate transformation,laser radar observation model and map building model of the inspection robot are derived and verified,This provides basic conditions for subsequent algorithm research and software design.Analyzed the mainstream laser mapping algorithms,such as Cartographer,Gmapping,and Hector SLAM.Then,a simulation environment was built using gazebo to comprehensively compare the mapping performance,CPU utilization,and occupancy of the three mapping algorithms.Finally,the Cartographer algorithm was selected as the basic mapping framework,and the visual odometer and closed-loop detection modules from ORB-SLAM3 algorithm were added to the Cartographer algorithm framework,Improved the robustness of the algorithm and the accuracy of mapping.We designed an autonomous navigation module,using the A* algorithm for global path planning and the Dynamic Window Algorithm(DWA)path planning algorithm for local path planning.We studied and analyzed the algorithms separately,and simulated them using Matlab software.By adding the DWA algorithm to the A* algorithm,the robot has dynamic obstacle avoidance ability.The software level of the inspection robot has been designed,specifically for the SLAM module,path planning module,wireless communication module,image acquisition module,and voice interaction module of the inspection robot,which has preliminarily met the functional requirements of the thermal power plant.Finally,the environmental conditions that basically meet the inspection of thermal power plant are built in the campus corridor to simulate the scene of thermal power plant,and the functions of inspection robot,such as autonomous mapping,autonomous inspection,image acquisition and voice interaction,are tested.Finally,the feasibility of inspection robot system is verified by analyzing the experimental results.