A Novel Cable-Driven Parallel Robot for Inner Wall Cleaning of the Large Storage Tank

摘要

Large vertical tanks are widely used in the storage of slag and powder in metallurgical industry. For inner wall cleaning of these large storage tanks, traditional working platforms such as hanging baskets and scaffolds have disadvantages of high labor intensity, high danger and low efficiency. Hence, this paper presents a novel cleaning robot working in the large tank based on the cable-driven parallel mechanism. A novel kinematic modeling method based on lifting point coordinates for the cable-driven parallel mechanism is proposed, which need not directly calculate the position and orientation of the center of the moving platform, but just indirectly analyzes the position and orientation of the moving platform through the positions of lifting points. In this way, the kinematic analysis becomes concise, and the workspace of the moving platform is convenient to obtain. For the cleaning robot working in a large storage tank with 50 m high and 18 m diameter, the forward and inverse kinematic solutions of the parallel mechanism with three cables are studied under the kinematic modeling method based on lifting point coordinates. Finally, the specific structure of the cable-driven parallel robot is designed.