Multimodal pipe-climbing robot with origami clutches and soft modular legs

Abstract

In nature, climbing trees and pipes of varying diameters or even navigating inside of hollow pipes and tree holes is easy for some climbing animals and insects. However, today's pipeclimbing robots, which are important for automatically conducting periodic inspections and maintenance of pipelines to save time and keep humans away from hazardous environments, are designed mainly for a specific task, limiting their adaptability to different working scenarios and further implementation in real-life. In this paper, we propose a pipe-climbing robot with a soft linear actuator for bioinspired propulsion, two origami clutches to realize multi-degrees-of-freedom (DoF) motion and two pairs of soft modular legs for multimodal climbing. Design, modeling and experimental validation of the origami clutch are introduced in detail. Preliminary experimental results show that we can achieve a stroke of up to 289.6% and a maximum 45 degrees bending angle on the soft linear actuator by regulating the air pressure inside the soft actuator and origami clutches. Additionally, by choosing the leg-type, three climbing modes, including out-pipe versatile mode, out-pipe high-force mode and inpipe mode can be realized for particular working scenarios. A prototype climbing robot demonstrates that in out-pipe versatile mode, the robot can climb on the exterior of pipes made of various materials including PVC, rubber and metal with diameters ranging from 105 to 117 mm. In the out-pipe high-force mode, the climber can navigate along a specific pipe carrying maximum 675 g external load at the top or 200 g hanging from the bottom, as well as keeping functional without failure under static loads as high as 1968 g. In the in-pipe mode, the robot is able to travel inside pipes. This research might bridge the design gap between in-pipe and out-pipe climbing robots while offering an alternative option for soft robots to execute multi-DoF motion.

Electromagnetic Feet With Soft Toes for Adaptive, Versatile, and Stable Locomotion of an Inchworm-Inspired Pipe Crawling Robot

“…The flexible body of an inchworm is composed of soft muscle fibers. Once these longitudinal muscle fibers contract, the inchworm deforms by bending and shortening in length (Han et al, 2017;Zhang et al, 2019;Jiang et al, 2020). The inchwormlegs are foot-like adaptive organs, helping the inchworm to anchor onto a surface.…”

Current Development on Origami/Kirigami‐Inspired Structure of Creased Patterns toward Robotics

“…The variant possibility is another reason for the origami research hype. The driving methods of these flat foldable structures include magnetic field driving, [36,50] cable tendon drive, [40,98,100] pneumatic, [26,29,47,101,102] servo motor, [30] SMA driving, [27,103] etc. [79] B) A corrugated vault is used as a transformable architecture that connects two existing buildings.…”

An inchworm-inspired soft robot with combined functions of omni-directional steering and obstacle surmounting

“…In recent years, soft robots made of flexible materials have become a popular topic for research because of their potential to complete a variety of specialized tasks in complex environments (Rich et al , 2018; Yang et al , 2019; Chung et al , 2021; Zou et al , 2021). Because soft robots can minimize the damage they cause to both themselves and to their surroundings, they have been increasingly used for diverse tasks such as grasping (Laschi et al , 2012; Shintake et al , 2016; Li et al , 2021; Su et al , 2022), pipe climbing (Verma et al , 2018; Zhang et al , 2019; Jiang et al , 2020; Xie et al , 2021), wall ascension (Malley et al , 2017; Robertson and Paik, 2017; Qin et al , 2019; Shao et al , 2020), terrestrial locomotion (Yang et al , 2021), amphibious locomotion (Tang et al , 2018; Hu et al , 2018) and even underwater exploration (Wang et al , 2017). However, soft robots are not without their flaws and have notable difficulties transferring between different rods and crossing over obstacles while on a rod (Liao et al , 2020; Zhu et al , 2021).…”