Process Optimisation and Design of an Automation Controller for a Multi-disciplinary Combat Engineering System.

Abstract

The design of an automation controller for a “Electro-Hydro-Mechanical Object Laying System” presented in this paper is multidisciplinary equipment. It consists of Electromechanical, Hydraulic actuators several sensors for process feedback. The conventional object-laying process is a time and labour-intensive manual process. Another way of laying the objects is through mechanical layers, in which most operations are mechanical, require constant human intervention, lack operator safety and don’t provide location marking data of laid objects. Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) method is adopted to develop the apparatus. There are complex mechanisms and processes involved in this apparatus, which are required to be operated/executed in a sequential and parallel manner in real-time. Based on the computational requirement for the Controller, the cPCI bus-based rugged architecture has been adopted with software built on RTOS. Operation synchronization of spatially distributed Electromechanical & Hydraulic actuators is required. Safe handling of the objects is one of the critical requirements. All the activities are automated with minimum human intervention to avoid risk to the crew. The resultant outcome of this process is the time reduction for object readiness by 54 % without compromising safety. We achieved average object marking accuracy up to 30cm in dynamic conditions on the vehicle platform using differential GNSS with multi-constellation and augmentation system support. This paper mainly focuses on electronic controller hardware design for military environments and process optimization to achieve a faster object laying rate.
Subjects
PROCESS optimization; AUTOMATION; ELECTRONIC controllers; GLOBAL Positioning System; DESIGN

Description