Design of a Control Strategy for Autonomous Docking with Fire Hydrant for Firefighting Robots

Autonomous docking with fire hydrants is the key to realizing the autonomous and long-term effective firefighting of firefighting robots. Therefore, this paper proposes a control strategy for autonomous docking of firefighting robots with fire hydrants that integrates a multilayer perceptron and an admittance controller. A multilayer perceptron predicts the deviation of the end-effector position and orientation of the robotic arm according to the real-time contact force obtained from the fire hose and fire hydrant. Admittance control enables the robotic arm to better adjust the end position and orientation to reduce the contact force and torque to achieve autonomous docking with the fire hydrant. The actual hose docking experiment was carried out on a custom-built test system. The experimental results show that the proposed control strategy can avoid the inaccuracy of model parameters and reduce the impact of parameter changes and environmental noise. Moreover, the proposed control strategy can decrease the contact force in the docking task, effectively avoid equipment damage, and greatly improve the safety and effectiveness of the docking task.