Aerial Manipulator With Rolling Base for Inspection of Pipe Arrays

Abstract

This paper considers the inspection by contact of long arrays of pipe structures in hard-to-reach places, typical of chemical plants or oil and gas industries, presenting the design of a hybrid rolling-aerial platform capable of landing and moving along the pipes without wasting energy in the propellers during the inspection. The presented robot overcomes the limitation in terms of operation time and positioning accuracy in the application of flying robots to industrial inspection and maintenance tasks. The robot consists of a hexarotor platform integrating a rolling base with velocity and direction control, and a 5-DOF (degree of freedom) robotic arm supported by a 1-DOF linear guide system that facilitates the deployment of the arm in the array of pipes to inspect their contour once the platform has landed. Given a set of points to be inspected in different arrays of pipes, the path of the multirotor and the rolling platform is planned with a hybrid RRT* (Rapidlyexploring Random Tree) based algorithm that minimizes the energy consumption. The performance of the system is evaluated in an illustrative outdoor scenario with two arrays of pipes, using a laser tracking system to measure the position of the robot from the ground control station.

Safe Local Aerial Manipulation for the Installation of Devices on Power Lines: AERIAL-CORE First Year Results and Designs

“…Figure 3 depicts these platforms. The MLMP platform is a multi-purpose aerial manipulator conceptually designed for the efficient installation of devices after landing on the power line and moving along it, using a rolling system inspired by [26]. This approach combines the benefits from rolling [20] and aerial solutions [22] into a compact system.…”

Experimental Evaluation of Aerial Manipulation Robot in Contact With 15 kV Power Line: Shielded and Long Reach Configurations

“…The PVC links, separated 20 cm, are supported by a U-shaped aluminum frame attached to the quadrotor base, using polymer bearings to allow the free rotation of the pendulum joint. The manipulator is a 3-DOF robotic arm developed in [42], built with Herkulex DRS-0101 smart servos and a frame structure manufactured in anodized aluminum. The base of the manipulator is a 200 × 25 × 2 mm aluminum profile section that supports the 2S 1800 mAh LiPo battery, the Raspberry Pi 3B+, and the 5 V battery.…”

Review of Aerial Manipulator and its Control

“…At the same time, a full feedforward coefficient adaptive attitude control method based on disturbance observer was proposed, which effectively improved the response speed and robustness of the traditional weight coefficient adaptive algorithm. Alejandro Suarez et al [51] proposed an aerial maneuvering robot with a rolling base, which can land and move along the pipeline without wasting the energy in the propeller during the inspection. The proposed robot overcomes the limitations of operating time and positioning accuracy in applying flying robots to industrial inspection and maintenance tasks.…”