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In this paper, a state observer design for a walking in-pipe robot is studied. The necessity of using a state observer is related to the fact that sensors have limited accuracy and are prone to producing noise. This is especially problematic for in-pipe walking robots, since they use model-based control and require accurate information of their current state. The paper shows that an iterative state observer based on solving Riccati equation provides significant improvements in the behaviour of the control system. It allows to smooth out the spikes in the control actions requested by controller and to minimize tremor of the robot links. In order to study the behaviour of the observer when different sensors are used, a performance function was introduced. It was shown that the observer allows to improve the performance of the control system for a wide range of sensor parameters. Additionally, it was shown that the introduction of the observer allows to choose higher feedback controller gains, enabling more precise control. Simulations on the full robot model, taking into account mechanical constraints and contact forces showed that the linear observer is capable of improving the behaviour of the control system of the walking robot, if measurements of the reaction forces are provided. The effects that the noise and quantization in the reaction forces measurements have on the behaviour of the state observer is studied.

Abstract. In this paper, a walking in-pipe robot is studied. The robot has six legs, each consisting of 3 links connected via rotary joints. The legs are attached to the robot's body. The work is focused on the problem of generating desired position and orientation for the robot's body, using a given footstep sequence. An iterative geometric algorithm for generating orientation sequence is proposed. The problem of finding the desired position of the center of mass of the robot's body is formulated as a problem of minimizing stretching of the robot's legs during steps. Also, an analytical solution for inverse kinematics problem has been given. All proposed algorithms do not require extensive calculation and use basic algebraic operations.