Design and Analysis of Drive Mechanism of Piping Robot

Abstract

Piping robots are needed for inner pipe operations in nuclear and oil & gas industries etc. Many pipe inspection robots have been developed. However the payload of these robots is small. To perform heavy duty operations such as grinding, piping robot with large payload must be developed. Furthermore detailed payload analysis which is important for the piping robot design is not available. In this paper, a screw-type drive unit which can handle large payload is developed. Detailed payload analysis is performed to guide the design of the drive unit. To validate the proposed methods, a drive unit was fabricated. Experiments were performed and the results demonstrate that the drive unit can climb inside horizontal pipes as well as vertical pipes with large payload.

Design and Development of Cam-Operated in-Pipe Robot (CIPR)

“…A caterpillar type in-pipe robot has been developed to inspect the long-distance pipeline [4]. A screw drive type in-pipe robot has been designed to climb through horizontal and vertical sections of pipe with large payload [5]. A snake type in-pipe robot (Slyder) has been developed to check the blockages inside the pipelines.…”