With recent advancements in Global Positioning Systems (GPS), localization systems are now typically equipped with a GPS. However, in a large variety of environments and real-world applications, GPS-based localization systems are not practical. This research tackles such a problem and illustrates the idea of fusing a camera and an inertial navigation system (INS) to create a dead reckoning loca...

Abstract Recently pneumatic-driven soft robots have been widely developed. Usually, the operating principle of this robot is inflation and deflation elastic inflatable chambers by air pressure. Some need rapid periodic their to generate continuous motion such as progress or rotational motion. However, if needs operate far from pressure source, long tubes are required supply its chambers. As a r...

One of the most important requirements of repairing and maintaining of pipelines is the ability to monitor and evaluate the pipe’s interior. In this paper, a novel apparatus to traverse pipes is introduced. The mechanism employs three independent rubber track units which are circumferentially spaced out 120 degree apart symmetrically. The apparatus employs an active mode to adapt to a wide rang...

Pipe line inspection is an important task where robotics could be applied extensively. Robotic pipeline inspection devices reported in literature are primarily of internal type, requiring special preparation of pipelines for their deployment and retrieval. In this context, robotic systems which can traverse along the external surface of the pipeline structure have the advantage of being able to...

We present a pipe inspection robot using a newly developed spherical ultrasonic motor (SUSM) as a camera actuator. The novel SUSM has improved the range of movement compared to previous SUSMs, and the robot can point a camera in any direction. In this study, we determined a method for controlling the rotational direction and strategic control from the kinematics and characteristics of ultrasoni...