Copyright © 19961FAC 8f-03 2

13th Triennial World Congress. San Francisco. USA

CONTROL AND DESIGN OF A PIPE CRAWLING ROBOT

Th. RoBmann·, F. Pfeiffer·

• TU Miinchen, Lehrstuhl B fUr Mechanik, Germany

Abstract. The project of an eight legged robot for pipe inspections is presented. Its
structure and its function principle is explained and its control is described. The latter
not only includes the presentation of the controlling concept but also the control design
with respect to the specific structural conditions. Furthermore the mechanical model
and its transformation into a simulation program is explained. A simplified model is
used for controller design. The effects of this reduction on the system dynamics are
examined. Finally simulation results using the designed controller are shown.

Keywords. Pipe Crawler, Mechanical Properties, Simulation, Force Control

1. INTRODUCTION

Tube systems differ in their pipe diameters, length, the

mediums inside and complexity of the tube arrangement
etc. Different kinds of robots have been developed for
inspecting and repairing the tubes from the inside. They
move forward by wheels, chains or float with the me-
dium. All robots have their specific difficulties, for ex-
ample problems of traction and low flexibility. In con-
trast the machine discussed in this paper moves by legs.
2. DESIGN OF THE ROBOT
The robot, shown in figure 1, has eight legs arranged
like two stars. The attachments of the legs are located in
two planes that intersect at the longitudinal axis of the
central body. These planes are called leg planes. Each leg
has two active joints, which are driven by DC-motors.
Their axes of rotation are orthogonal to the leg planes.
This provides each leg with a planar mobility. The leg is
mounted to the central body with an additional passive
joint, which allows small compensating movements in the
Fig. 1. Construction of the Pipe Crawling Robot
third direction. The crawler has a length of about 0.75m
and is able to work in pipes with a diameter of 60 -70cm.
In each of the eight legs, the distance between the two
active joints (hip and knee) is 15em and the length of the
last leg segment (from knee to foot) is 17em. The highest
possible torque of the hip joint is 78N m short term and
40Nm permanent. The corresponding values of the knee
are 78Nm and 20Nm. So a leg is able to carry 6.5 times
its own weight permanently and 12 times for short time
operations in a stretched out position. This powerful leg
design is a progress of an already existing construction
that works very effectively (Pfeiffer et al., 1994). The
total weight of the robot is about 20kg including the
whole power electronics and the controllers.

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 4. DYNAMICS OF THE CRAWLER
A simulation program, which includes all the relevant
properties of the robot, was developed. By means of this
program it is possible to get informations about the sys-
tem behaviour and to determine the motor power re-
serves. Since the elastic eigenfrequencies of the system
parts are very high, a modeling as a rigid body system
is favourable. The system parts are the central body, the
rotors of the motors, the shafts of the gears and segments
of the legs. Different to industrial robots the stiffness
of the gears is negligible for the system behaviour. The
reasons for this are the extreme light weight design, the
very short lever arms and the small moments of iner-
tia of the segments. The friction of the used Harmonic
Drive Gears, which strongly depends on the torque, has
great influence on the control and on the loads of the mo-
tors (coulomb friction in meshing). For consideration of
this effect, "normal torques" are established to calculate
tangential friction torques that act against the direction
of the rotation. To include sticking without load (effects
like No-Load Starting Torque and No-Load Back Driving
Torque) an initial tension Aa of the gears is introduced.
For sticking under load the transmitted torques are ad-
ded to the initial tensions. The dynamics are described
by the following equations (Seyfferth, 1993):
Mij= h + WNAN + WHAH + HR (ANa + Aa) (1)
YN = W~ij + WN = 0 (2)
YH = WJ;.ij + WH =0 (3)
with:
H Ri = -J.liwTisign(9T;) (4)
>'Nai = IANiI (5)
M denotes the mass matrix, h is the vector of gyroscopic
forces, active moments and active forces. The vector of
the generalized coordinates q (its dimension is 62) con-
tains the six degrees of freedom of the central body, the
angles of the leg joints and the degrees of freedom of the
motors and the gears. AN is the vector of the normal
torques (see above) and AH the vector of the constrain-
ing torques caused by sticking of the gears. Correspond-
ing to this, the constraints are denoted gN, gH with
the Jacobian matrices W Nand W H. Different to usual
stick-slip problems, the normal torques can have positive
and negative values and are therefore corresponding to
normal forces of a bilateral guiding device. The friction
torques of the rotating gears are determined by the ab-
solute values of the normal torques, the initial tensions
and the friction coefficients J.li and are projected into the
generalized sliding directions through WTi. As usual, the
passing from sticking to slipping is detected by reaching
the stick limit ATi = J.l(ANi + Aad and from slipping to
sticking with the kinematic condition YTi = O. In order
to determine the accelerations, the equations are trans-
formed into a linear complementary problem This can
be solved with the Lemke algorithm (Glocker, 1993).
In addition to the mentioned ones, the following phe-
nomena are part of the simulation model: The contact
between legs and ground is realized with a spring-damper
element, which represents the rubber balls at the end of
the legs. The temperatures of the motors are integrated
with a two body model with unlimited caloric conduct-
ibility. With these temperatures the torque reserves of
the motors can be determined, which are only limited
by burning out. Furthermore the motors are changing
their behaviour in a not negligible manner caused by the
dependence of their coil conductivity on temperature.
5. REDUCED MODEL FOR CONTROL DESIGN
5.1 Nonlinearities
Nonlinearity of the leg position: The system paramet-
ers of the robot can be considered as constant within a
period of time due to the slow motion. A usual method
for such systems is to change the parameters of the con-
troller in dependence of the parameters of the system
(adaptive control). In contrast, the aim of this work was
to find a PID controller which is robust against these
changes in the parameters. For the controller synthesis,
a temporary design is realized, which uses the linear-
ization around the mean value of the leg positions. Fi-
nally, the robustness of the control system is achieved
by means of a multi-model-design, which uses several
linearizations around different leg positions.
Coulomb Friction: As already explained, the friction in
the leg joints has a considerable influence on the system
behaviour. The friction can be divided into the follow-
ing three parts: A constant part, a part depending on
torques (Coulomb friction) and a part depending on an-
gular velocities (viscous friction). Especially the first two
parts cause a not tolerable error in the controlled forces.
This error can be reduced by using a feedforward com-
pensation in the case of rotating joints. In the case of
sticking joints the acting friction torque is unknown (the
direction as well as the amount) and can not be com-
pensated in this way. Since the friction parameters are
uncertain, the differences to the nominal values should
be compensated by integral controllers. Possible stick-
slip behaviour of such kind of systems did not show up
in the simulation of the system. An other possibility for
compensation of the Coulomb friction torque is to use
a disturbance observer. This solution has the advant-
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ages that the torques can be observed also in the case of
sticking and that observers can handle the uncertainties.
Nonlinearity of the Controller: The design ofthe control-
ler is linear. But in reality switch functions are required
in the controller for observing the stick limits of the dif-
ferent legs. These are working in such a way that by
reaching the limit the set points of the leg forces are re-
distributed static-equivalently to other legs. The normal
forces are also modified automatically if higher tangen-
tial forces are needed. An analysis has shown that the
eigenvalues of the system change only by small amounts
for different force distributions.
5.2 Reduction of the Model
The overall three dimensional rigid body model has 62
degrees of freedom. To reduce the effort the eigenforms
of the three dimensional system are analyzed and com-
pared with the eigenforms of a planar substitute system
with 11 degrees of freedom. Thus the latter is identified
as the observable and controllable subset of the complete
system with reference to the legs with ground contact
(the normal load phase has four legs of one plane on
the ground). Legs with no contact can be viewed as de-
coupled from the remaining system and are not part of
this model. This means that the reduction to the con-
tact plane is correct without any change of the relevant
system behaviour. The influence of the stiffness of the
different gear levels are also explored in more detail. To
do this, the simulation model was expanded in an appro-
priate way. As expected the additional compliances do
not change the interesting system behaviour. The res-
ulting eigenfrequencies over 150Hz are negligible and
damped to zero within 0.03s.
5.3 Transformation of the Coordinates
For the controller design it is useful to change the co-
ordinates to a set which contains only the controlled
variables. By neglecting the damping of the rubber balls,
which is an uncertain value and very small in compar-
ison to other damping effects in the system, the eight
controllable leg force components F can be expressed in
the central body coordinates q z and the joint angles qB.
The whole system has the following state space repres-
entation. M, D and e are the rigid body system matrices,
U is the vector of the motor inputs and Bu the corres-
ponding projection into the coordinate space.
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x = (~ ~ ) ( _MO-le _M~l D) (~ ~ )-1 X
+ (~ ~) (M-~ Bu ) U (7)
6. CONTROLLER DESIGN
Since the controller should work decent rally, the prob-
lem of the design of such strongly coupled systems like
this crawling robot spreaded in a tube is that not every
measured signal can act on every servo component. For
the design of local controllers the design methods can be
divided into central and decentral ones. The latter have
the main disadvantage that the couplings are considered
only approximately and that their effects on the closed
loop stability are examined only after the design process.
Because of this reason and the strength of the couplings
a central design method seems to be better suited for
this system. From a central point of view the desired
controller has a structure with a general restriction. A
common method for these cases is an optimization of a
cost function. This will be done in a second step with
the multi-model-system. The disadvantage of this tech-
nique is that a stable set of controller coefficients must be
known at the beginning. To get this set another method
is applied with the robot linearized around the mean leg
position.
6.1 Operating Level Restrictions
The central level is shown in figure 3 by the feedback
of the central body coordinates X z. The control mat-
rix K L computes a dynamic output which corrects, if
necessary, the position of the robot. FG is added to
this output. This corresponds to a pilot control of the
weight. The result is distributed to the legs with the mat-
rix V. The distribution is a non linear procedure caused
by the switch functions, which correct forces exceeding
the sticking condition. For the controller design this is
not considered and V is assumed to be constant.
On the decentrallevel the forces and their derivatives are
passed back directly (direct force control). The matrices
K PE" K PF, KIF and K v have a block diagonal struc-
ture. Each block represents one leg and includes the coef-
ficients ofthe leg controller (index P F for force feedback,
P F for the feedback of the time-derivatives of the forces
and IF for the force integral components). The matrix
K v is the feedforward control of the desired forces and
is well known. It depends on the transposed Jacobian
matrix, on the motor characteristic and on the trans-
missions of the gears. With the described feedbacks the

Fig. 3. Block Diagram of the Operating Level
control structure shown in figure 3 results in the follow-
ing overall control matrix R:
The state vector is rearranged in a way that the feedback
of the central body variables (q z, (lz) is represented
in the first column of R. The matrices of the first line
are acting on the motors through the matrix B and the
matrices of the second line are acting on the force integral
components.
6.2 Modal Synthesis
In a first step the desired control matrix is evaluated us-
ing the method of modal synthesis which is given by G.
Roppenecker (Roppenecker, 1983). Closed loop eigenval-
ues Ai are achieved by:
The parameter vectors Pi can be chosen arbitrarily.
With an optimization (gradient method) the requested
structure of the controller matrix can be created by vari-
ation of these vectors.
Force Feedback: It was found, that it is not useful to sat-
isfy all the conditions at once. A better way is to calcu-
late the force feedback first. The feedback of the position
control has no conditions to satisfy in this task. Such a
procedure is suitable because the leg control is the in-
terior circuit of a cascade controlled system. A Riccati
solution with a high weighting of the forces in the cost
function was evaluated to get reasonable eigenvalues of
the system. With these values a control matrix of the fol-
lowing structure was calculated. The matrices K land
K 2 are not restricted and will not be used any further.
R = (Kl KpF KpF KIF) (10)
I K2 0 0 0 iment for doing this. These problems can be solved by
Central Body Feedback: Now only the matrix KL is un-
known. Since this matrix determines the two forces and
the torque to correct the robot position and these val-
ues can be considered as the input from the exterior to
the interior loop, the system is transformed in accord-
ance with the cascade structure. A new Riccati solution
yields new eigenvalues. The weighting in the cost func-
tion changes to high values for the positions and velocit-
ies and low ones for the forces. Higher weighting of the
forces influences the input of the interior loop in an un-
desirable manner. These values should be justified with
the weighting of the central controller output. A matrix
with the following structure is calculated.
Ro=(KLOOO) (11)
6.3 Robust Control
To achieve robust control a classical quadratic criterion
is applied to state and control variables. The robot is
linearized around three different leg positions.
(12)
Xji and U ji are the state vectors and controller outputs
of the i-th system. No general solution can be found for
systems with structural restrictions because of the de-
pendencies on the initial conditions. To get nevertheless
a general qualification of the controller n different initial
conditions (index j) are used. Assuming negative real
parts of the closed loop eigenvalues the integrals con-
verge and can be evaluated analytically. The optimiza-
tion started with the controller design of the last section.
6.4 Future Work
For the design of the controller it was assumed that the
central body coordinates are known or can be determ-
ined from the joint angles. The simulation of the robot
has shown that this is not possible, because the motions
in the compilances of the rubber balls are not negligible.
This is especially true for the velocities. With a filter
the results become much better, but the system becomes
slower and shows more liability to oscillations. An other
unknown quantity is the gravity. It should be known to
prevent the robot from falling. In the current configura-
tion the actual direction is given in the beginning and the
robot must integrate its movement. The position errors
and unknown motions in the passiv joints are a imped-
using an observer for the central body motions and for
the direction of gravity. Such an observer can be expan-
ded for the contact points on the wall and can be used for
a early dedection of slipping. This would be important
for successfull reactions of the higher controller levels.
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