Regular inspection of bridge cracks is crucial to bridge maintenance and repair.The traditional manual crack detection methods are timeconsuming,dangerous and subjective.At the same time,for the existing mainstream vi...Regular inspection of bridge cracks is crucial to bridge maintenance and repair.The traditional manual crack detection methods are timeconsuming,dangerous and subjective.At the same time,for the existing mainstream vision-based automatic crack detection algorithms,it is challenging to detect fine cracks and balance the detection accuracy and speed.Therefore,this paper proposes a new bridge crack segmentationmethod based on parallel attention mechanism and multi-scale features fusion on top of the DeeplabV3+network framework.First,the improved lightweight MobileNetv2 network and dilated separable convolution are integrated into the original DeeplabV3+network to improve the original backbone network Xception and atrous spatial pyramid pooling(ASPP)module,respectively,dramatically reducing the number of parameters in the network and accelerates the training and prediction speed of the model.Moreover,we introduce the parallel attention mechanism into the encoding and decoding stages.The attention to the crack regions can be enhanced from the aspects of both channel and spatial parts and significantly suppress the interference of various noises.Finally,we further improve the detection performance of the model for fine cracks by introducing a multi-scale features fusion module.Our research results are validated on the self-made dataset.The experiments show that our method is more accurate than other methods.Its intersection of union(IoU)and F1-score(F1)are increased to 77.96%and 87.57%,respectively.In addition,the number of parameters is only 4.10M,which is much smaller than the original network;also,the frames per second(FPS)is increased to 15 frames/s.The results prove that the proposed method fits well the requirements of rapid and accurate detection of bridge cracks and is superior to other methods.展开更多
According to the structure character of the passive sub-chain of the 3TPS-TPparallel mechanism, the kinematic constraint equations of the movable platform are established,based on which the closed-form inverse kinemat...According to the structure character of the passive sub-chain of the 3TPS-TPparallel mechanism, the kinematic constraint equations of the movable platform are established,based on which the closed-form inverse kinematics formula of the parallel mechanism are presented.Through parting the spherical joints of the active sub-chains and using the force and momentequilibrium of both the active sub-chains and passive sub-chain, the constraint forces acting on theparted joints are determined. Subsequently, the analytic expressions of the actuator driving forcesare derived by means of the force equilibrium of the upper links of active sub-chains.展开更多
Three-degree of freedom（3-DOF） translational parallel manipulators（TPMs） have been widely studied both in industry and academia in the past decades. However, most architectures of 3-DOF TPMs are created mainly on ...Three-degree of freedom（3-DOF） translational parallel manipulators（TPMs） have been widely studied both in industry and academia in the past decades. However, most architectures of 3-DOF TPMs are created mainly on designers＇ intuition, empirical knowledge, or associative reasoning and the topology synthesis researches of 3-DOF TPMs are still limited. In order to find out the atlas of designs for 3-DOF TPMs, a topology search is presented for enumeration of 3-DOF TPMs whose limbs can be modeled as 5-DOF serial chains. The proposed topology search of 3-DOF TPMs is aimed to overcome the sensitivities of the design solution of a 3-DOF TPM for a LARM leg mechanism in a biped robot. The topology search, which is based on the concept of generation and specialization in graph theory, is reported as a step-by-step procedure with desired specifications, principle and rules of generalization, design requirements and constraints, and algorithm of number synthesis. In order to obtain new feasible designs for a chosen example and to limit the search domain under general considerations, one topological generalized kinematic chain is chosen to be specialized. An atlas of new feasible designs is obtained and analyzed for a specific solution as leg mechanisms. The proposed methodology provides a topology search for 3-DOF TPMs for leg mechanisms, but it can be also expanded for other applications and tasks.展开更多
The pneumatic muscle actuator(PMA)has many advantages,such as good flexibility,high power/weight ratio,but its nonlinearity makes it difficult to build a static mathematical model with high precision.A new method is p...The pneumatic muscle actuator(PMA)has many advantages,such as good flexibility,high power/weight ratio,but its nonlinearity makes it difficult to build a static mathematical model with high precision.A new method is proposed to establish the model of PMA.The concept of hybrid elastic modulus which is related to the static characteristic of PMA is put forward,and the energy conservation law is used to achieve the expression of the hybrid elastic modulus,which can be fitted out based on experimental data,and the model of PMA can be derived from this expression.At the same time,a 3-DOF parallel mechanism(a new bionic shoulder joint)driven by five PMAs is designed.This bionic shoulder joint adopts the structure of two antagonistic PMAs actualizing a rotation control and three PMAs controlling another two rotations to get better rotation characteristics.The kinematic and dynamic characteristics of the mechanism are analyzed and a new static model of PMA is used to control it.Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this new static model.展开更多
Performance analysis and kinematic design of the 3-PUU pure translational parallel mechanism with vertical guide-ways are investigated. Two novel performance indices, the critical slider stroke and the main section ar...Performance analysis and kinematic design of the 3-PUU pure translational parallel mechanism with vertical guide-ways are investigated. Two novel performance indices, the critical slider stroke and the main section area of workspace, are defined; The expressions of two other indices, i.e. the global dexterity and global force transfer ratio are revised based on the main section of workspace. Using these indices, performance changes versus the varieties of dimensional parameters of mechanism are investigated in detail and the graphic descriptions of change tendencies of the performance indices are illustrated. By means of these obtained graphic descriptions, kinematic parameters for the 3-PUU pure translational parallel mechanism with better characteristics can be directly acquired.展开更多
Dynamic modeling of a parallel manipulator（PM） is an important issue. A complete PM system is actually composed of multiple physical domains. As PMs are widely used in various fields, the importance of modeling the ...Dynamic modeling of a parallel manipulator（PM） is an important issue. A complete PM system is actually composed of multiple physical domains. As PMs are widely used in various fields, the importance of modeling the global dynamic model of the PM system becomes increasingly prominent. Currently there lacks further research in global dynamic modeling. A unified modeling approach for the multi-energy domains PM system is proposed based on bond graph and a global dynamic model of the 3-UPS/S parallel stabilized platform involving mechanical and electrical-hydraulic elements is built. Firstly, the screw bond graph theory is improved based on the screw theory, the modular joint model is modeled and the normalized dynamic model of the mechanism is established. Secondly, combined with the electro-hydraulic servo system model built by traditional bond graph, the global dynamic model of the system is obtained, and then the motion, force and power of any element can be obtained directly. Lastly, the experiments and simulations of the driving forces, pressure and flow are performed, and the results show that, the theoretical calculation results of the driving forces are in accord with the experimental ones, and the pressure and flow of the first limb and the third limb are symmetry with each other. The results are reasonable and verify the correctness and effectiveness of the model and the method. The proposed dynamic modeling method provides a reference for modeling of other multi-energy domains system which contains complex PM.展开更多
基金This work was supported by the High-Tech Industry Science and Technology Innovation Leading Plan Project of Hunan Provincial under Grant 2020GK2026,author B.Y,http://kjt.hunan.gov.cn/.
文摘Regular inspection of bridge cracks is crucial to bridge maintenance and repair.The traditional manual crack detection methods are timeconsuming,dangerous and subjective.At the same time,for the existing mainstream vision-based automatic crack detection algorithms,it is challenging to detect fine cracks and balance the detection accuracy and speed.Therefore,this paper proposes a new bridge crack segmentationmethod based on parallel attention mechanism and multi-scale features fusion on top of the DeeplabV3+network framework.First,the improved lightweight MobileNetv2 network and dilated separable convolution are integrated into the original DeeplabV3+network to improve the original backbone network Xception and atrous spatial pyramid pooling(ASPP)module,respectively,dramatically reducing the number of parameters in the network and accelerates the training and prediction speed of the model.Moreover,we introduce the parallel attention mechanism into the encoding and decoding stages.The attention to the crack regions can be enhanced from the aspects of both channel and spatial parts and significantly suppress the interference of various noises.Finally,we further improve the detection performance of the model for fine cracks by introducing a multi-scale features fusion module.Our research results are validated on the self-made dataset.The experiments show that our method is more accurate than other methods.Its intersection of union(IoU)and F1-score(F1)are increased to 77.96%and 87.57%,respectively.In addition,the number of parameters is only 4.10M,which is much smaller than the original network;also,the frames per second(FPS)is increased to 15 frames/s.The results prove that the proposed method fits well the requirements of rapid and accurate detection of bridge cracks and is superior to other methods.
基金This project is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.59775006)Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China (No.200031).
文摘According to the structure character of the passive sub-chain of the 3TPS-TPparallel mechanism, the kinematic constraint equations of the movable platform are established,based on which the closed-form inverse kinematics formula of the parallel mechanism are presented.Through parting the spherical joints of the active sub-chains and using the force and momentequilibrium of both the active sub-chains and passive sub-chain, the constraint forces acting on theparted joints are determined. Subsequently, the analytic expressions of the actuator driving forcesare derived by means of the force equilibrium of the upper links of active sub-chains.
基金supported by the Chinese Scholarship Council(CSC)for his Ph D study and research at LARM in the University of Cassino and South Latium,Italy,during 2013-2015
文摘Three-degree of freedom（3-DOF） translational parallel manipulators（TPMs） have been widely studied both in industry and academia in the past decades. However, most architectures of 3-DOF TPMs are created mainly on designers＇ intuition, empirical knowledge, or associative reasoning and the topology synthesis researches of 3-DOF TPMs are still limited. In order to find out the atlas of designs for 3-DOF TPMs, a topology search is presented for enumeration of 3-DOF TPMs whose limbs can be modeled as 5-DOF serial chains. The proposed topology search of 3-DOF TPMs is aimed to overcome the sensitivities of the design solution of a 3-DOF TPM for a LARM leg mechanism in a biped robot. The topology search, which is based on the concept of generation and specialization in graph theory, is reported as a step-by-step procedure with desired specifications, principle and rules of generalization, design requirements and constraints, and algorithm of number synthesis. In order to obtain new feasible designs for a chosen example and to limit the search domain under general considerations, one topological generalized kinematic chain is chosen to be specialized. An atlas of new feasible designs is obtained and analyzed for a specific solution as leg mechanisms. The proposed methodology provides a topology search for 3-DOF TPMs for leg mechanisms, but it can be also expanded for other applications and tasks.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(No. 51405229)the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China(Nos. BK20151470,BK20171416)
文摘The pneumatic muscle actuator(PMA)has many advantages,such as good flexibility,high power/weight ratio,but its nonlinearity makes it difficult to build a static mathematical model with high precision.A new method is proposed to establish the model of PMA.The concept of hybrid elastic modulus which is related to the static characteristic of PMA is put forward,and the energy conservation law is used to achieve the expression of the hybrid elastic modulus,which can be fitted out based on experimental data,and the model of PMA can be derived from this expression.At the same time,a 3-DOF parallel mechanism(a new bionic shoulder joint)driven by five PMAs is designed.This bionic shoulder joint adopts the structure of two antagonistic PMAs actualizing a rotation control and three PMAs controlling another two rotations to get better rotation characteristics.The kinematic and dynamic characteristics of the mechanism are analyzed and a new static model of PMA is used to control it.Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this new static model.
基金This project is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.60275031)Municipal Key Lab Open Fund of Beijing, China (No.KP01-072200384).
文摘Performance analysis and kinematic design of the 3-PUU pure translational parallel mechanism with vertical guide-ways are investigated. Two novel performance indices, the critical slider stroke and the main section area of workspace, are defined; The expressions of two other indices, i.e. the global dexterity and global force transfer ratio are revised based on the main section of workspace. Using these indices, performance changes versus the varieties of dimensional parameters of mechanism are investigated in detail and the graphic descriptions of change tendencies of the performance indices are illustrated. By means of these obtained graphic descriptions, kinematic parameters for the 3-PUU pure translational parallel mechanism with better characteristics can be directly acquired.
基金Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant Nos.51275438,51405421)Hebei Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No.E2015203101)
文摘Dynamic modeling of a parallel manipulator（PM） is an important issue. A complete PM system is actually composed of multiple physical domains. As PMs are widely used in various fields, the importance of modeling the global dynamic model of the PM system becomes increasingly prominent. Currently there lacks further research in global dynamic modeling. A unified modeling approach for the multi-energy domains PM system is proposed based on bond graph and a global dynamic model of the 3-UPS/S parallel stabilized platform involving mechanical and electrical-hydraulic elements is built. Firstly, the screw bond graph theory is improved based on the screw theory, the modular joint model is modeled and the normalized dynamic model of the mechanism is established. Secondly, combined with the electro-hydraulic servo system model built by traditional bond graph, the global dynamic model of the system is obtained, and then the motion, force and power of any element can be obtained directly. Lastly, the experiments and simulations of the driving forces, pressure and flow are performed, and the results show that, the theoretical calculation results of the driving forces are in accord with the experimental ones, and the pressure and flow of the first limb and the third limb are symmetry with each other. The results are reasonable and verify the correctness and effectiveness of the model and the method. The proposed dynamic modeling method provides a reference for modeling of other multi-energy domains system which contains complex PM.
