On Radiation-Based Thermal Servoing: New Models, Controls and Experiments
This work addresses the problem of temperature regulation as a motion control problem for robots, which is valuable for industrial, dermatology, and field robot applications.
This paper introduces a new sensor-based control method for robots to regulate heat transfer between a radiative source and an object through robot motions. The authors developed a geometric-thermal-motor model and designed two new thermal servoing controllers (model-based and adaptive), demonstrating their effectiveness experimentally.
In this paper, we introduce a new sensor-based control method that regulates (by means of robot motions) the heat transfer between a radiative source and an object of interest. This valuable sensorimotor capability is needed in many industrial, dermatology and field robot applications, and it is an essential component for creating machines with advanced thermo-motor intelligence. To this end, we derive a geometric-thermal-motor model which describes the relationship between the robot's active configuration and the produced dynamic thermal response. We then use the model to guide the design of two new thermal servoing controllers (one model-based and one adaptive), and analyze their stability with Lyapunov theory. To validate our method, we report a detailed experimental study with a robotic manipulator conducting autonomous thermal servoing tasks. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first time that temperature regulation has been formulated as a motion control problem for robots.