The BOA system is a mobile pipe-external robotic crawler used to remotely strip and bag asbestos-containing lagging and insulation materials (ACLIM) from various diameter pipes in (primarily) industrial installations. Steam and process lines within the DOE weapons complex warrant the use of a remote device due to the high labor costs and high level of radioactive contamination, making manual re...

Recently many plants' pipes and drains became old and many robots to inspect these pipes were developed in the past. Wired robots were put to practical use, but they had a heavy power supply and a signal wire. Therefore, new inspection robots using wireless radio communication system are considered useful for long complex pipes and long distance pipes including straight, vertical and bend line....

I n this paper a multijoint robot for sewer inspection tasks is presented. I n order to increase the operating scope the robot has been made able to run round or over obstacles, to follow sewage branches and is aimed to work wirelessly unlike most other sewer inspection robots. As a result of the wireless approach the robot has to carry an energy resource and must be able to act autonomously. I...

Many robot applications require mobility in constrained spaces and a high degree of flexibility. This paper describes the development of an autonomous serpentine robot. This robot is a 12 degree of freedom, untethered, hyper-redundant planar robot, named Kaa. Experiments were conducted in its application to mobility tasks that would be useful in locomotion among parallel pipe structures similar...

In this paper, a piezo actuated micro robot with active force control (AFC) capability is modelled and simulated for an in-pipe application. A mathematical model that describes the dynamic characteristics of the micro robot is first presented. The dynamic response of the robot system subjected to different input excitations is then investigated by initially considering a conventional proportion...

A model suited for control tasks is developed for a submerged offshore pipe during the pipelay operation. The pipe is fixed in the touchdown point at the seabed in one end and attached to a pipelay vessel in the other end. The developed model is discrete and is on the form of the robot equation with minimal coordinates. Thus the methods of controller synthesis and stability analysis can be appl...