A simple and novel helical drive in-pipe robot

Abstract

SUMMARYPipeline grids of various size and material are pervasive in today's modern society. The frequent inspection and maintenance of such pipeline grids have presented a tremendous challenge. It is advocated that only advanced robot design embedded with intelligent electronics and control algorithms could perform the job. Given the ever increasing demands for intelligent in-pipe robots, various in-pipe drive mechanisms have been reported. One of the simplest is helical wheel drives that have only one degree of freedom. All previously reported in-pipe helical drives are based on independent passive wheels that are tilted an angle. One of the major problems of current helical wheel drives is their unstable traction force. In this paper, instead of allowing the wheels to rotate independently, they are synchronized by adding a timing belt. This small change will result in significant improvement which will be highlighted in this paper. In the proposed driving method, tracking force is analyzed together with a comprehensive set of traction force measurement experiments. Both analysis and experiments have shown that the proposed mechanism has great potential for in-pipe robot drive design.

Design of a new steerable in-pipe inspection robot and its robust control in presence of pipeline flow

“…Consider the MIMO system of Eq. (17). The goal of control design is to propose a control law to decrease the error between the state vector and the desired reference state trajectory ( )…”

“…Peng Li et.al [16] designed a novel screw-based in pipe robot which can move through both circular and square tube pipe-lines with curvature using a wall pressed mechanism. Helical drive in-pipe robots are usually designed with passive wheels however, Yonghua Chen et.al [17] proposed a new mechanism of inpipe robot in which the wheels are synchronized by connecting timing belt. The experimental tests show better traction force for this novel in-pipe robot.…”

Helical-Contact Deformation Measuring Method in Oil–gas Pipelines

“…An in-pipe robot vehicle that can move in a pipe of diameter from 160 mm to 210 mm is developed by the authors [23]. This vehicle is used to carry the helical-contact deformation measuring device to conduct the measurements.…”

Development of an Active Helical Drive Self-Balancing in-Pipe Robot Based on Compound Planetary Gearing

“…The helical motion of the in-pipe robot can be achieved through several means, including the conventional passive driving scheme, where the rotation of the wheel carrier drives the driving wheel to passively rotate. The driving wheel generates an axial pulling force that drives the robot to move forward through passive rotation [12], [13]. Another example is the active driving scheme proposed by the authors, where the power source directly propels the driving wheel to rotate and then drives the wheel frame to rotate [14]- [16].…”