Design of a multilink-articulated wheeled pipeline inspection robot using only passive elastic joints

Abstract

This paper presents a multilink-articulated robot with omni and hemispherical wheels (AIRo-2.1) for inspecting and exploring pipelines. To quickly adapt to winding pipes, holonomic rolling movement without moving forward and backward is useful. However, this requires the rolling actuators to replace the driving actuators at the expense of the driving force. Furthermore, so far the number of driving wheels and torsion springs, magnitude of driving forces, stiffness and natural angle of the spring that are required to adapt to various pipelines have not been clarified. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of high maneuverability of multilink-articulated robots in winding pipes with as few driving actuators as possible and only elastic joints (torsion springs) for body bending. We further validate its effectiveness by experimental verification.