Design of automatic inspection robot for beltconveyor based on functional analysis

Belt conveyor has the advantages of long-distance continuous transportation and has become an important equipment for the transportation of coal and other mining materials. During the long-term continuous operation,the performance degradation of key components of belt conveyor will lead to belt slippage,deviation,and belt breakage. In view of the problems of slippage and poor stability of the upper and lower slope drive of traditional automatic inspection system for belt conveyor,an automatic inspection robot based on the mixed drive of track friction and gear-rack meshing was designed. Based on the function analysis,the overall schemes of inspection robot were designed and the two-stage driving mode of the friction drive of the walking wheel and the track was proposed for horizontal movement and the two-stage drive mode of the gear-rack meshing drive was adopted for the up-and-down slope movement,which increases the inspection robot's capabilities. The climbing ability avoids the insufficiency of slipping up and down slopes existing in the traditional inspection device. Considering the harsh inspection conditions of the belt conveyor,the mechanical structures such as the driving system and the walking system of inspection robots were designed in detail,and Creo software was used to establish three-dimensional model of inspection robot. According to the functions realized by the inspection robot’s control system,the hardware selection of the inspection robot's control system and the flow chart design of program of the control system of inspection robot were completed,and the endurance time of inspection robot was calculated. ANSYS software was used for finite element analysis of the baseplate and the bracket. The lightweight design of the base plate was completed,and the strength of the baseplate and the bracket was checked and analyzed. ADAMS software was used to simulate and analyze the motion process of inspection robot,and the results of kinematics simulation show that inspection robot can smoothly switch between horizontal motion and up-slope motion without interference.