Control Architecture Design for an Gas Cutting Robot

This paper describes preliminary results from using reactive control architecture, known as CAPSC (Control Architecture for Poor Strip Cutting), which is designed for a gas cutting robot in Gwangyang steelworks, South Korea. This gas cutting mobile robot, called APSCR (Autonomous Poor Strip Cutting Robot) is designed to identify the poor strips, move an initial cutting position, and start to cut over 60 m long poor strip every 9 m by using a gas cutting- torch. Since its working environment is extremely complex to robot´s functionalities and furthermore robot must deal with explosive tanks, APSCR requires more appropriate control architecture in order to provide the following criterions; safety and simplicity. One of the popular control architectures successfully applied to the service mobile robots, reactive control architecture, is employed as primary control such as navigation, obstacle detection, cutting and so on. Besides, walkthrough procedure for safety is implemented to supervise all possible risks to workers and robot for itself. The experimental results are provided to prove a reliability of the proposed architecture.