Heat Exchanger Defect Detector
Autonomous Power Plant Operation
2019-2020
Axial Motion
In yet another research opportunity, I assisted in creating a robot, funded by the Department of Energy, to automatically measure and detect heat exchangers in power plants.
For this project, I was the lead programmer for the robot. The design and manufacturing of the device was overseen by graduate students above me, although I occasionally machined parts for it in our machine shop. The reason I was chosen to program this robot was that I had prior coding experience in my past research endeavors and coursework. I taught myself Arduino in a matter of weeks and was able to produce motion in the robot in a short time. The research group initially was utilizing a 3D printing host to control the motors, but this method required human intervention to control the robot itself. I was able to get homemade Arduino code onto the motherboard, which was originally designed to be used in a 3D printer. This allowed the motion to become entirely autonomous and allow for more specific control and debugging of the code. Originally, the axial servo swung heavily with large angle changes, in a dangerous and inaccurate way. However, this problem was resolved when I converted the code into a rapid series of small angle changes. This Arduino motion code is being paired with Python code developed by an older researcher through LabVIEW to allow for machine learning to occur in the robot.
