Research on novel spatial structure of power generation of spherical robot

• Published in: Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part E: Journal of Process Mechanical Engineering
• Main Authors: Zhai, Yuyi, Ding, Zihang, Liu, Yunjia, Jin, Shaohua, Kang, Liang
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 2020
• Subjects: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; Antarc*; Antarctic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0954408920932358; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0954408920932358; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full-xml/10.1177/0954408920932358

Continuous energy supply is essential to spherical mobile robot in the Antarctic investigation. This paper puts forward energy harvesters that can generate electricity from the wind to achieve the long time and the long range exploration. The major contribution is to present the preliminary models of the energy harvester which uses the law of electromagnetic induction, and meanwhile the spatial structures about generating electricity are analyzed, and the influence of different structures on the power generation and efficiency will be obtained. In order to get the characteristics of power generation efficiency, this paper designs one element pipeline model and two element pipeline model, and then the motion of magnet in harvester will be simulated in different installed structures and wind speed. The varying rules of induced voltage are concluded at last. Finally, experiments are implemented based on the simulated model. The experimental results verify the dependability of different structural schemes of the robot and the validity of induced voltages’ varying rules. The results show that the induced electromotive force value obtained by the one element pipeline structure model is larger than the two element pipeline model, but the stability of the latter is better. Through the research in this paper, it can provide a basis for selecting a suitable spherical robot space structure according to the environmental conditions to improve the endurance.