Active Vibration Reduction for the Autonomous Observation Mechanism

This paper presents a method applied for vibration reduction in an autonomous mechanism developed for robot-insect interaction. The mechanism performs continuous data collection of honeybee behaviour within a living honeybee colony. To ensure sufficient quality of the observations, the system has to be installed in proximity to the hive. However, as honeybees are particularly sensitive to vibrations, it is important to keep the vibrations produced by the mechanism below the values that can disturb the natural behaviour of the bees. Furthermore, avoiding vibrations improves the gathered data quality, decreases the maintenance frequency and prolonges the system service life. In this paper, we present the robotic observation mechanism’s development process of vibration control. The subspace identification method is applied to determine a model utilised to design a controller to actively reduce the resulting vibration while preserving the position tracking accuracy. The results of the experiments demonstrate a reduction of about 10dB in the vibration after applying the suggested controller.