Design of a Novel Locomotion Mechanism of Power Transmission Line Inspection Robot

The working environment of the inspection robot is a high altitude flexible cable environment. The robot navigating process must be stable and reliable. The robot mechanism grips the line though locomotion mechanism when navigating obstacles. The locomotion mechanism needs to have a strong clamping capacity and stability. According to the environmental characteristics of transmission lines, a novel locomotion mechanism of inspection robot is presented. The locomotion mechanism adopting differential mechanism can grip different diameter lines. The Tri-Step reducer design to ensure that the various model lines of rapid firmly clamped. The locomotion mechanism is introduced, and the gripper force is analyzed. The experiment results demonstrate that the mechanism has such characteristics as strong grip ability, good motion stability, and different diameter lines gripping capability.

Realization of DFM in Mold Design & Manufacturing

The diversified market demand and shorter production cycle, as well as other factors, have increasingly complicate the problems of mold during design and manufacturing. Considering both design and manufacturing to facilitate the production progress, the effective collaborative development becomes an important issue for mold factor. The realization of DFM (Design for Manufacturing) is attached with more importance by the industry. More manufacturing-related data and information are added in the design phase, so that the manufacturing phase may be easier and smoother to enhance the competitive advantage, thus reducing the product development time and improving the production quality. Therefore, this research aimed to develop a web-based mold design for manufacturing architecture with knowledge management, and realize the application of DFM in the field of mold design/manufacturing with CAD redevelopment tool and by navigating design process. This research established a knowledge-based navigating process by utilizing design parameters and features, in order to increase the mold design/manufacturing efficiency to 50%, and avoid unnecessary human errors to ensure the accumulation and inheritance of correct knowledge.

The Integration of Unified Knowledge Management with Mold-Design Navigating Process

This study uses the embedded browser in the most widely used CAD (Computer Aided Design) , with the mold-design navigating process of the secondarily developed component as the core, to construct a networked knowledge management platform with the interaction between the relational database management and mold-design navigating process. It then integrated the component knowledge database, historical cases and technical files, and gave the overall consideration of mold manufacture and injection molding to assist the mold design. The component knowledge database provides related components and shortens the time of mold design. The historical knowledge database offers related issue points for reference, reducing the repeated occurrence of design errors. The technical knowledge database furnishes the related knowledge in the process of mold development, accelerates the new employee training and cuts the labor cost. For the knowledge database in use, the data will automatically increase and grow, gradually becoming know-why and know-how of strong enterprises, know-what of handling problems and important core assets of the enterprise. The unified integration and utilization of the component, historical and technical knowledge databases make the mold-design navigating process more complete and accelerate the mold design. By data classification and grouping, a consistent GUI (Graphic User Interface) is established, replacing the words by icons, easier for developers to use. The accumulation and feedback of the knowledge databases provide more complete data, information and knowledge and thus considerably reducing the time for the mold development.