The Study Of Structure And Kinematics Of Robot For Airplane Fuel Tank Inspection

Fuel leakage of Aircraft will lead to waste of resource, increase costs, and even aviationaccidents. To guarantee the flight safety, the periodically check of the aircraft fuel tank leaksis needed. The leakage and corrosion check of aircraft fuel tank has been quite a difficultproblem in civil aviation maintenance efficiency. At present, internal sealing tank inspectionimplemented mainly through artificial means, however, the tank is mixed with oil and gas andhas the risk of flammable and explosive. Therefore, It’s urgent to find a substitute of staff inaircraft fuel tank internal by workers.At first, the structure of the robot for inspecting internal aircraft fuel tank based on thecharacteristics of continuous-type structure has been designed. The robot includes snake armand liner model，and snake arm can reach into the fuel tank everywhere, the liner modeloutside the tank support and guidance the snake arm. Inside and outside with rigid-flexiblecombination of features make the robot inspect aircraft fuel tank efficiently and reliably.Then, the robot is driven by four wire ropes through remote-control-method, this methodis different from other robots directly driven by the electric motor. Thus kinematics analysismust take the driving cables length variables into consideration. A solution framework isestablished among the cables length, angle and tip coordinate of single section by projectioncurvature and coordinates transformation. The decoupled kinematics equation between themulti-sections is deduced based on the analysis of single-section kinematics.Finally, based on the mechanical structure of fuel tank inspection robot,design of thehardware system and software systems.Then, the feasibility to inspect fuel tank of the robothas been verified through three-dimension simulation experiment; the bending and rotationcapacity and correctness of the proposed kinematics method has been verified throughprototype experiments.