Research On A Novel Modular Robot Oriented To The Self-Repairing Of Space Solar Cells

As an effective solution for the utilization of solar energy in the future, space solar power station is drawing more and more attention in this"energy crisis"era. Many countries including China have established some long-term plans on the space solar power station project. As we all known, solar cells array which is composed of a large number of solar cell units is the energy receiver and it gets a scale of several kilometers in diameter. Once there are some malfunction occurred in somewhere in the array, both sending people and equipments to repairing the cells array would lead too costly problems, thus the self-reconfigurable modular robot technology can be a relatively economically option for the array's self-repairing.Self-reconfigurable modular robot is a multi-robot system composed of many autonomous intelligent modules, which is representing a integration of"deformation reconstruction"and"autonomous mobile"design ideas. It can change the system configuration to adapt to different working environments through the relative movement among the modules. Strong environment adaptability and robustness make the self-reconfigurable modular robot distinguished flexibility feature, extending its application to many fields such as space exploration, deep sea exploration, nuclear power plant maintenance, disaster relief and so on. The self-reconfigurable modular robot owns a bright prospect and great research significance.This paper records a elaborate research on self-reconfigurable modular robot oriented to the self-repairing of space solar cells array. The main work includes four aspects as follow:Firstly, accomplishing overall design of the self-reconfigurable modular robot according to system requirements, and giving a detailed description of its docking mechanism.Secondly, proceeding related computing for selection and structures static analysis which are essential in the design process owing to its functions for the design optimization and verification.Thirdly, programming the motion control software of modules based on Visual Studio 2008 C # develop environment, and then carrying out a simulation experiment with the first generation module prototype on the ground.Finally, analyzing path planning for self-repairing in the modular robot system and proposing a vectorization intelligent search algorithm based on the minimum energy consumption; simultaneously a simulation is applied to verify its validity.The results of prototype experiments and path planning simulation indicate that the self-reconfigurable modular robot can fulfill the prospective design requirements, be capable for the self-repairing of space solar cells array.