Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2021
26th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Instrumentation and digitalization of a hexapod robot aiming the inspection of aeronautical structures.
Submission Author:
Gabrielle Pimentel , SP , Brazil
Co-Authors:
Gabrielle Pimentel, Gustavo Barbosa, Sidney Bruce Shiki
Presenter: Gabrielle Pimentel
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2021.COB2021-0698
Abstract
The use of robotics in the industry is a strategy that has been increasingly implemented over the years, since it became a good alternative to substitute some manual work in order to optimize the safety of the process. In this context, the application of mobile and bioinspired robots became an important research topic due to the need of devices capable of dealing with irregular terrain and accessing hard-to-reach places. In the category of bioinspired systems, hexapods are six-legged robots that mimic the kinematics of insects or other animals in order to provide greater stability during its motion. The main goal of this article is to develop the instrumentation and digitalization of a hexapod robot designed for the inspection of aeronautical structures. This is performed by the online monitoring of the activities of the mobile robot during its operation. Low-cost sensors and an ESP8266 fast-prototyping hardware are used to develop the monitoring system. In order to provide a self-awareness capability to the robot, an HC-SR04 ultrasound sensor, an inertial measurement unit MPU6050, and a GPS module GY-NEO6MV2 are tested aiming the use on the hexapod system. The combination of all of them ensures a wide view of the irregularities and inclinations that the robot will suffer during its trajectory, as well as the presence or absence of obstacles in its path. Also, inspired by the Internet of Things (IoT) concept, understood as a connection capable of interconnecting physical objects to the web transmitting its data to the network, the sensor signals collected during the operation of hexapod are transmitted to a cloud-based IoT software called ThingSpeak. This platform can be used on both mobile devices and computers. It receives the data from the sensors read by the ESP8266 microcontroller through wireless communication. Then it transforms this data in a graphic dashboard representation that can be remotely monitored by the technical staff during the inspection of aeronautical parts. In this paper, the proposed online monitoring system is tested during a simulation of the operation of the hexapod robot during the inspection of an aeronautical structure. In the conclusions of the paper, the main advantages and drawbacks of the proposed platform are finally highlighted.
Keywords
Low cost digital data acquisition system, Internet of Things, On line Monitoring, Robotics
