Motion Planning for Steam Generator Tube Sheet Quadruped Maintenance Robot

The steam generator tube sheet quadruped maintenance robot is a novel mobile robot designed for the inspection of steam generator heat transfer tubes. This paper presents a motion planning method for this type of robot. The trajectory of the robot's base is planned through kinematic solutions search. Additionally, a foothold motion evaluation system is established using the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution algorithm to plan the movement of foothold points. For a given motion path, our proposed method divides the path into multiple straight-line segments, and then performs separate planning for turning foothold points and straight-line foothold points. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is adaptable to steam generator tube sheets and performs well in environments with obstacles since the algorithm proposed has a planning success rate of 100% for the tube sheet robot. The experiments validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.