Force Control of a Foldable Robot Arm in a Drone for a Solar Panel Cleaning Task

Abstract

This paper presents a design and control of a foldable robot arm for a drone (FRAD) to clean solar panels. The foldable robot arm can be extended and folded with s-shaped linkage lattice structures. Three plane lattice structures are combined to form a triangular pole to enhance the stiffness of the arm. An individual or a group based cleaning strategy for different clusters of bird droppings is proposed and determined by K-means method and self-organizing map. Hybrid force control is applied to the arm to regulate the contact force for a cleaning task. Experimental studies of clustering bird droppings and cleaning them are demonstrated to confirm the proposal.