Investigations of Design Issues Related To In-Pipe Inspection Robots

Basically robots are designed in such way that they remove human intervention from labour intensive and hazardous work environment; sometimes they are also used to explore inaccessible work places which are generally impossible to access by humans. The inspection of pipe comes in same category because they carry toxic chemicals, fluids and most of the time has small internal diameter or bends which become inaccessible to human. The complex internal geometry and hazard content constraints of pipes demand robots for inspection of such pipes in order to check corrosion level of pipe, recovery of usable parts from pipe interior, sampling of sludge and scale formation on pipe internal surface etc. Several designs of in-pipe inspection robots have been proposed in the literature to solve the problems related with inspection of these complicated internal geometries. It is felt that a review of the design issues considered in various developed models would help to compare their main features and their relative advantages or limitations to allow choose the most suitable design for a particular application and also throw light on aspects that needs further attention. In view of above, this paper presents investigation of design issues pertaining to development of in-pipe inspection robotics. Keywords—Review in pipe inspection robot, design issues, in-pipe robot, IPIR.