Wireless Starting System and Emergency Stop for Teleoperated Hydraulic Mobile Machine

Abstract

A small general-purpose teleoperated hydraulic mobile machine is studied at the Institute of Hydraulics and Automation at the Tampere University of Technology. Thanks to teleoperation, the operator of the machine is able to be in safe place during the driving when necessary. However, the actions of the machine can be dangerous for the people or the objects in the environment if problems appear for instance in the control system. On that account, safety issues must be considered carefully. Special attention has to be paid to stop the machine and start the engine again once the machine has recovered from an error situation. The goal of this paper is to describe the design and implementation of different kind of solutions to start and stop the machine wirelessly. The emergency stop can be activated through the wireless connection by the operator or by the automatic diagnostic system of the hydraulic mobile machine. The control system monitors the state of several hydraulic components such as hydraulic valves and motors by means of sensors during the operations of machine. The machine is teleoperated by using WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) connection. The developed wireless starting system and emergency stop is totally independent of the WLAN link. In the first prototype of the wireless starting system and emergency stop, the wireless connection is carried out by using commercial, cost effective RF (Radio Frequency) modules. The data transfer protocol which is used by the modules is designed for this application. Protocol implementation is carried out with microcontrollers. Another version of the wireless starting system and emergency stop is carried out by using radio modems. The modems have better properties than the cost effective RF modules used in the first prototype due to their higher RF output power. Programmatically carried out automatic emergency stop, which stops the machine, if the WLAN connection between the control station and the machine breaks, is discussed. In that case, the independent wireless emergency stop connection is not needed. Implementations of the system are introduced in this paper. Also, some testing results and user experiences are described. Properties of these different implementations are compared: cost of the system, range, reliability and complexity of the implementation. By means of the studied results the most suitable solution to start the engine and stop the actions of the machine is chosen.

Design of GPS/MM/GPRS Integrated Location System for the Mobile Robot

“…So, it may lead to inaccurate location when the robot is moving at a higher speed. WLAN (wireless LAN) [6] has high speed to transmit multimedia data, but it can not be applied in long distance communication because its effective communication distance is no more than 100m.…”