A Novel Crawling In-pipe Robot Design

Design, Development, Dynamic Analysis, and Control of a Pipe Crawling Robot

Well functioning water networks are essential to the sustainability of a community. Large transmission and distribution water mains are often the most sensitive components of these networks since their failure can be catastrophic. Furthermore, due to the high cost of these pipes, the system does not usually provide redundancy to enable decommission for maintenance and rehabilitation. Hence, fai...

Development of Pipe-Crawling Robot for Pipeline Network Discovery

Design and Analysis of a Novel Tendon-less Backbone Robot

A new type of backbone robot is presented in this paper. The core idea is to use a cross shape mechanism with the principle of functioning of the scissors linkages, known as a pantograph. Although this continuum arm acts quite similar to tendon-driven robot, this manipulator does not include any tendon in its structure. This design does not suffer from the weaknesses of the continuum design suc...

Intrinsic Tactile Sensing for the Optimization of Force Distribution in a Pipe Crawling Robot

This paper describes a tactile sensing system based on a force/torque sensor for the feet of a pipe crawling robot. Such a sensing system is needed for better optimization of force and joint load distribution and a safer avoidance of the risk of foot slippage. While conventional tactile sensing devices typically provide information concerning the spatial distribution of normal pressures, the in...

Design of a Crawling Gait for a Modular Robot

In order to reduce the cost and development time of an all-terrain autonomous robot, a modular approach is used. The robot is designed as simple as possible by using one-degree-of-freedom modules that allow the platform to auto-reconfigure to use two different locomotion models inspired by biological systems: quadruped and crawling locomotion. The pros and cons of crawling are discussed and the...