Design and Development of Explosion-Proof Tracked Vehicle for Inspection of Offshore Oil Plant

摘要

French oil company TOTAL and ANR (L'Agence Nationale de la Recherche) organize the ARGOS (Autonomous Robot for Gas and Oil Sites) Challenge, which our research group had the opportunity to participate in. ARGOS is a research and development competition for mobile robots capable of autonomous inspection of instruments and teleoperated information gathering in oil plants, in place of human workers. One of the features of this challenge is that robots should be constructed with explosion-proof structures, because the target plants may have explosive atmospheres. To participate in the third competition of the ARGOS Challenge in March 2017, we developed AIR-K, an explosion-proof robot. The AIR-K is divided into three parts to make it explosion-proof. According to the features for robot functions and sensors, it uses a flameproof battery enclosure (Ex 'd'), a pressurized apparatus (Ex 'p') for its body, and intrinsic safety (Ex 'i') for sensors; the explosion-proof of the robot is achieved by a combination of these methods. In this paper, we introduce the design guidelines and implementations that allow our robot to be explosion-proof.