Autonomous location control of a robot manipulator for live maintenance of high-voltage transmission lines
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to develop a robot for tightening charged bolt to solve the shortcomings of high labor intensity, low efficiency, high risk and poor reliability in artificially tightening drainage board bolt of strain clamp for high voltage transmission line. Realizing bolt-nut capture and location by manipulator is a critical process to complete the whole working task. To solve such key technology, an autonomous location control method for N-joint robot manipulator based on kinematics was proposed.
Design/methodology/approach
Through D-H kinematics analysis under flexible working environment of transmission line, the autonomous location control of double manipulators can be abstracted as a nonlinear approximation problem based on joint inverse kinematics. In addition, regarding the complex coupling relationship among different joint angles and the complex decoupling process which leads to the non-uniqueness of inverse solution, an improved backpropagation (BP) network was proposed based on the combination of dynamic adaptive adjustment of learning rate and variable momentum factor, so that the inverse kinematics of manipulator can be solved and the optimization evaluation mechanism of inverse solution can be presented. The proposed autonomous location control method is of adaptability to flexible environment and structural parameters of different drainage boards. The simulation results verified the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with the other location control, this method can achieve faster location speed, higher precision and lower hardware cost. Finally, the field operation test further validated that such autonomous location control method was of strong engineering practicability.
Findings
The proposed autonomous location control method is adaptable to a flexible environment and to the structural parameters of different types of drainage board. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, which, in comparison with other approaches to location control, can achieve faster location, higher precision and lower hardware cost. Finally, a field test further confirms the engineering practicability of the proposed autonomous location control method.
Originality/value
The proposed method can achieve faster location speed, higher precision which meet the requirement of real-time control relative to the standard BP algorithm. Moreover, it is of strong adaptability to flexible environment and structural parameters for different drainage board. Field operation experiment further validated the engineering practicability of the method.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the funding support from the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (2006AA04Z202), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51105281), Special fund of the central universities People’s Republic of China (2104005), State grid Hunan electric power company of China (5216A01400B1), Guangdong Robot Special Project (2015B090922007), Foshan Technical Innovation Team Project (2015IT100143) and South Wisdom Valley Innovative Research Team Program (2015CXTD01). The authors also wish to thank anonymous reviewers, each of whom provided comments that directed important improvements in the manuscript.
Citation
Jiang, W., Wu, G., Fan, F., Wang, W., Zhang, J., Ye, X. and Zhou, P. (2017), "Autonomous location control of a robot manipulator for live maintenance of high-voltage transmission lines", Industrial Robot, Vol. 44 No. 5, pp. 671-686. https://doi.org/10.1108/IR-08-2016-0220
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