Abstract
The article deals with development and application of snake robot for inspection pipes. The first step involves the introduction of a design of mechanical and electrical parts of the snake robot. Next, the analysis of the robot locomotion is introduced. For the curved pipe, potential field method is used. By this method, the system is able to generate path for the head and rear robot, linking the environment with obstacles, which are represented by the walls of the pipe. Subsequently, the solution of potential field method is used in inverse kinematic model, which respects tasks as obstacle avoidance, joint limit avoidance, and singularity avoidance. Mentioned approach is then tested on snake robot in provisional pipe with rectangular cross section. For this research, software Matlab (2013b) is used as the control system in cooperation with the control system of robot, which is based on microcontrollers. By experiments, it is shown that designed robot is able to pass through straight and also curved pipe.
Highlights
A pipe inspection task is an often performed operation, which is done using a broad spectrum of robotic systems based on wheeled chassis, tracked chassis, bristled robots, or snake robots
Master microcontroller is in rear robot link and using Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) communication it communicates with the main control system—PC through universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART)
The snake robot SnIPE is introduced, which was developed for experimental analysis of pipe inspection tasks
Summary
A pipe inspection task is an often performed operation, which is done using a broad spectrum of robotic systems based on wheeled chassis, tracked chassis, bristled robots, or snake robots. Development of snake robots started in 1970s by Prof. Idea of designing snake robots comes from nature and mainly because of the high-level of flexibility of snakes to their environment. High degrees of freedom (DOF) enables this kind of mechanism to be more adaptable to its rough terrain and environment.[1]. A considerable amount of snake robots were developed until now, with lateral undulation locomotion using passive wheels, which represent or simulate repulsion of robot from an obstacle.[2,3] Our study concerns snake robot without any wheels, wherein its forward motion is enabled using contact forces with walls of the pipe
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