Design and Reachability Analysis of a Rigid–Flexible Robot for Interior Wall Spraying of Large Oil Cabins

Abstract

Product oil tankers are essential transportation equipment for petroleum transfer. Due to petroleum products’ intense penetration and solubility, the quality requirements for coating product oil tankers are high, and regular maintenance is needed. Currently, this relies on manual labor, which involves working in enclosed spaces with harsh conditions, high labor intensity, long working time periods, and unstable quality. We proposed a lightweight, rigid–flexible robotic system using a cable-driven parallel robot with a serial framework-type manipulator arm to address this with conceptual design and dimensional analysis. Based on the kinematic and static modeling, we analyzed the workspace of the cable-driven parallel robot. Considering the interference issues under different robot poses, we analyzed the dimensions of the framework-type manipulator arm and the terminal reachability of the rigid–flexible robotic system. The results show that the proposed rigid–flexible robot can cover all areas to be coated, providing a new automated solution for the specialized coating of product oil tanker cabins.