Trajectory Control of a Robotic Carrier for Solar Power Plant Cleaning System

In most environments, solar panels need some cleaning system for dust removal. Recently, robotic cleaning systems have been introduced and used in power plants. Typically, one cleaning robot is dedicated for each row of panels, since it is difficult to move the robot between the rows. This paper is on introduction and control of a robotic carrier system, which can move the cleaning robot between the rows. Our first prototype of this robotic system is introduced. Then, the robot is modeled and controlled, to study its properties, performance and motor requirements, as a part of its design analysis before its manufacture. The robot kinetic and kinematic models have been derived and validated by ADAMS. Then, the kinetic and kinematic model based controllers are introduced for robot motion control. Using the kinetic model, a CTM (Computed Torque Method) controller is designed and simulated. For less computational efforts, a TJ (Transposed Jacobian) controller is designed, using the kinematic model. Furthermore, to increase the control performance, an MTJ (Modified TJ) controller is designed. A desired trajectory is designed for the robot. For verification and analysis, the controllers are simulated using the co-simulation of MATLAB Simulink and ADAMS dynamics. The simulation results show satisfactory performance of the controllers, and are used for further design analysis of the initial prototype.