Reachability Analysis of a Rigid-Flexible Cable Robot for Interior Coating of Tanker Ships

Tanker ship is an important transportation equipment for petroleum. Due to the strong permeability and solubility of refined oil product, the high-quality inner wall special coating of tanker ships needs to be carried out regularly, which relies on manual operation with poor working conditions in confined space, high labor intensity, long cycle and fluctuating coating quality. This paper designs a lightweight rigid-flexible robot with a cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) and a symmetric mechanical arm in series. The workspace analysis of the CDPR is completed based on kinematic and static modeling. The size of the symmetric mechanical arm and the terminal reachability are analyzed considering the interference. The results show that the proposed rigid-flexible cable robot can cover all the areas to be coated, which provides a new automatic solution for the inner wall special coating of tanker ships.