Conceptual Design and Analysis of Pipe Climbing Robot

Abstract

Robotics is one of the most emerging technologies in the current scenario. In this fast-growing technological world automation through robotics finds its place in almost all the fields. Climbing robots became more popular due to their versatile applications like inspection of tall buildings, tanks, structures, facade cleaning, fruits harvesting on tall trees (coconut) and many more. It became most adaptive as working on height may lead to dangerous incidents for human beings. Operations like visual inspection, crack detection of tall structures and pipes can be made possible with specially designed pipe climber robot. It finds its applications where human cannot reach, like hazardous applications. Specially design robots for a specific application also performs well with precision. This paper presents the novel design and analysis of pipe climbing robot for Chemical plant pipeline fault and leakage detection purpose. Design of all components of the robot is done with the basic mathematical consideration and then its analysis is carried out using FEA tools and MATLAB. Results of Forward and Inverse kinematic analysis of robot are obtained for certain specific points of trajectory. Dynamic analysis has been performed for motor selection and torque calculation. Presented conceptual design and analysis can be useful for pipe inspection purpose.

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“…Tree, pipe, and pole climber robot mechanisms. (a) Pole climber (Pole Climber, 2021), (b) coconut tree climber (Dubey et al, 2016), (c) parallel robot tree climber (Aracil et al, 2003), (d) tree bot—tree climber (Lam & Xu, 2012), (e) pipe climber (Tavakoli et al, 2011), (f) octopus design (Ito et al, 2020), (g) wheeled‐based pole climber (Noohi et al, 2010), and (h) two jaw pipe climber robots (Shah, Dave, Majithiya, et al, 2021). [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]…”

“…Proposed mechanical design of a ladder‐climbing robot (Shah et al, 2022) and a pole‐climbing robot. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]…”