Abstract
Denne oppgaven går gjennom forskjellige type teknologier for å utvikle en mobil offshore klatre robot.
To improve human safety and environmental concerns, oil and gas industry is interested in using remote and autonomous robots instead of human workers on offshore platforms. This will also increase their revenue and allow operations in places where it is too difficult to operate in. This project is further development of a custom climbing robot called Walloid at University of Oslo, currently under development. Walloid is a 4 arm climbing robot with arms and grippers designed for possible later usage in offshore platforms. Through
this project, as a contribution to the Walloid project, an end effector with gripping functionality and three climbing gaits with focus on optimization of speed were developed. Thereafter, the focus was on developing a control hardware capable of handling 12 motors and 24 encoders simultaneously. To achieve this a distributed embedded system consists of five micro-controllers (Arduino boards with Atmega AVR 8 bit) was designed and implemented with two interconnection protocols (ZigBee and RS-232). Based on the hardware design, a distributed control algorithm was designed to implement the earlier developed climbing gaits. This distributed navigation program supported remote controlling, semi-autonomy, repeating taught (logged) tasks, and power optimization algorithms to put idle parts into sleep mode. Due to absence of the physical robot, the evaluation of the work was done by self-developed simulation tools.
The power optimization algorithm, together with optimized climbing gaits reduced the power consumption of the system significantly.