• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.999-1010
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• 2003

Uninterrupted power supply has become indispensable during the maintenance task of active electric power lines as a result of today's highly information-oriented society and increasing demand of electric utilities. This maintenance task has the risk of electric shock and the danger of falling from high place. Therefore it is necessary to realize an autonomous robot system using electro-hydraulic manipulators because hydraulic manipulators have the advantage of electric insulation and power/mass density. Meanwhile an electro-hydraulic manipulator using hydraulic actuators has many nonlinear elements, and its parameter fluctuations are greater than those of an electrically driven manipulator. So it is relatively difficult to realize not only stable contact work but also accurate force control for the autonomous assembly tasks using hydraulic manipulators. In this paper, the robust force control of a 6-link electro-hydraulic manipulator system used in the real maintenance task of active electric lines is examined in detail. A nominal model for the system is obtained from experimental frequency responses of the system, and the deviation of the manipulator system from the nominal model is derived by a multiplicative uncertainty. Robust disturbance observers for force control are designed using this information in an H$\_$$\infty$/ framework, and implemented on the two different setups. Experimental results show that highly robust force tracking by a 6-link electro-hydraulic manipulator could be achieved even if the stiffness of environment and the shape of wall change.

• Journal of Ecology and Environment
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.34-44
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• 2017

Background: Monitoring terrestrial vegetation cover condition is important to evaluate its current condition and to identify potential vulnerabilities. Due to simplicity and low cost, point intercept method has been widely used in evaluating grassland surface and quantifying cover conditions. Field-based digital photography method is gaining popularity for the purpose of cover estimate, as it can reduce field time and enable additional analysis in the future. However, the caveats and uncertainty among field-based vegetation cover estimation methods is not well known, especially across a wide range of cover conditions. We compared cover estimates from point intercept and digital photography methods with varying sampling intensities (25, 49, and 100 points within an image), across 61 transects in typical steppe, forest steppe, and desert steppe in central Mongolia. We classified three photosynthetic groups of cover important to grassland ecosystem functioning: photosynthetic vegetation, non-photosynthetic vegetation, and bare soil. We also acquired normalized difference vegetation index from satellite image comparison with the field-based cover. Results: Photosynthetic vegetation estimates by point intercept method were correlated with normalized difference vegetation index, with improvement when non-photosynthetic vegetation was combined. For digital photography method, photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic vegetation estimates showed no correlation with normalized difference vegetation index, but combining of both showed moderate and significant correlation, which slightly increased with greater sampling intensity. Conclusions: Results imply that varying greenness is playing an important role in classification accuracy confusion. We suggest adopting measures to reduce observer bias and better distinguishing greenness levels in combination with multispectral indices to improve estimates on dry matter.