InPipe robot

Inward Pipeline Wheeled Scanning Robot

This robot is a novel design of a mobile pipeline robot with wheels drive unit and measuring machine for inner surface inspection of small size pipes. It uses wall press adhesion forces to be able to climbing along pipes using a single actuator to achieve mobility in 100mm diameters.

The robot is 500 mm length and consists of three main parts, the drive module, the control module and the NDT module. The upper module is the drive module; it is composes by one stator and rotor, these are connected by an active universal joint and powered by one dc motor with gearbox reduction. The control module is placed in the middle for cabling reasons and the bottom module is a NDT system simulated by digital sensors.

All three modules are designed as stators; these are equipped with a set of wheels which allow the motion parallel to the tube axis; however, the drive module has the rotor equipped with wheels tilted 10° which generates the axial motion with a small pitch with respect to the plane perpendicular to the tube axis, similar as a spiral motion.

The robot is wirelessly control equipped with 12 batteries (AAA NiCd 1200 mAh) that last in one hour of continuous operation. These are distributed around the motor on the stator in the upper module. The NDT module is integrated by 16 inductive digital sensors placed around the pipe acting as NDT probes, inspecting the pipes for defects or cracks.

Countries & Year

England, Colombia - 2006

Authors

Hernando Leon-Rodriguez