Driving Mechanisms, Motion, and Mechanics of Screw Drive In-Pipe Robots: A Review

Ren, Tao; Zhang, Yin; Li, Yujia; Chen, Yonghua; Liu, Qingyou

doi:10.3390/app9122514

Cited by 27 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…In-pipe robots can be categorized into many forms based on patterns of movement, as shown in Figure 1 [13]. These categories are wheels [15], [16], track/caterpillar [17], [18], inchworm [19], [20], walking [21], [22], screw [23], [24] and pig [25] types based on their motion mechanisms [14]. The most widely spread categories are wheeled, inchworm, snake and legged.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanical Design and Simulation of a Water Pipes Cleaning Robot

Hashem

Abdelwahab

2021

Port-Said Engineering Research Journal

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Pipelines have widely spread applications in the industry. Water, sewage, flammable liquid, high-pressure gasses, and oil are transported using pipelines. These pipelines are long, interconnected, and may be constructed underground or underwater. This makes their monitoring, periodic maintenance, and repair a hard job when done by human operators. Hence, a robot system capable of carrying out these complicated operations in pipelines is extremely requested. In this paper, a mechanical design and a prototype of an in-pipe robot system for cleaning 0.5 m inner diameter water pipes are presented. The proposed robot system is designed to perform cleaning operations for straight and curved horizontal water pipes based on the abrasion concept. The in-pipe robot system has three modules; forward and backward motion module, two identical cleaning modules that can move in rotational motion, and radial motion (in and out). These three modules are designed to have the robot's two main positions: an open position (for cleaning) and a closed position (while entering and getting out of the pipe). A 3D model has been built using SolidWorks software, then a finite element analysis was carried out on a robot's frame using two materials: Steel and Aluminum. However, the Steel material has been selected due to its high rigidity. The robot control system was done using Arduino software. Robot dynamics were simulated in a Simulink environment. The real-time robot testing showed that the proposed robot mechanism can complete the cleaning operations effectively. The developed robot is expected to minimize maintenance time, effort, and cost.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanical Design and Simulation of a Water Pipes Cleaning Robot

Hashem

Abdelwahab

2021

Port-Said Engineering Research Journal

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“…When designing and manufacturing robots to perform work in extreme conditions, much attention must be paid to study the physical prototypes, which are characterized by the motion without a continuous track and high passability in challenging road conditions. An example of such problems is described in the work of Ren et al, where the authors developed several prototype robots for testing pipes in the fields of oil and gas pumping [15]. Yang et al developed a new creeping robot called "Hibot," inspired by a six-legged insect at low cost, lightweight, and simple functionality.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Zoomorphic Mobile Robot Development for Vertical Movement Based on the Geometrical Family Caterpillar

Attar

Abu-Jassar

Yevsieiev

et al. 2022

Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience

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Research in robotics is one of the promising areas in mobile robot development, which is planned to be implemented in extreme dangerous conditions of areas explored by humans. This article aims at developing and improving a prototype of zoomorphic mobile robots that are designed to repeat the existing biological objects in nature. The authors performed a detailed analysis on the structure and dynamics of the geometrical family caterpillar movement, which is passed on a practical design implemented to perform the dynamic movement on uneven vertical surfaces. Based on the obtained analysis, the design and kinematic scheme of the movement is developed. Also, the structural control scheme via the Internet technologies that allow carrying out remote control is presented in this paper, considering the dangerous mobile robot work zones. To test the recommended solutions, the authors developed detailed 3D printed models of the mobile robot constructions for the implemented hardware. The model of the mobile robot is constructed, and the control system with examples of the user program code implementations is performed. Several experiments were performed, which showed the efficiency of the achieved mobile robot for solving problems of vertical movement on uneven metal surfaces. Moreover, the obtained slow motion of the designed robot proves that the simulated robot behaves similarly to the natural behavior of caterpillar movement.

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“…To address passiveness, in-pipe robots are designed in which their motion is independent of flow. In the literature, the robots that are in contact with pipe wall are common mechanisms [9][10][11][12][13] while free-swimming robots are also designed for small pipes [14]. Several factors impact the motion of these robots; the operation condition of these robots are pipelines with varying sizes in which high-pressure flow is present that applies huge disturbances on the robot [15], the robot path is not always a horizontal path and the inclination angle of the pipe affects the motion of the robot.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards long-distance inspection for in-pipe robots in water distribution systems with smart motion facilitated by particle filter and multi-phase motion controller

Kazeminasab

Banks

2022

Intel Serv Robotics

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Incident in water distribution systems (WDS) cause water loss and water contamination that requires the utility managers to assess the condition of pipelines in a timely manner. However, pipelines are long and access to all parts of it is a challenging task; current in-pipe robots have the limitations of short-distance inspection and inability to operate in-service networks. In this work, we improve the design of our previously developed in-pipe robot and analyze the effect of line pressure and relative velocity on the robot during operation with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. An extreme scenario for robot operation is defined and we estimate the minimum inspection distance for the robot with one turn of battery charge that is 5400m. A multiphase motion controller is proposed that ensures reliable motion at straight and non-straight configurations of pipeline and also stabilized configuration with zero velocity at junctions. We also propose a localization and navigation method based on particle filtering and combine it with the proposed multi-phase motion controller. In this method, the map of the operation is provided to the robot and the robot localizes itself based on the map and the particle filtering method. Furthermore, the robot navigates different configurations of pipelines by switching between different phases of the motion controller algorithm that is performed by the particle filter algorithm. The experiment and simulation results show that the robot along with the navigation shows a promising solution towards long-distance inspection of pipelines by in-pipe robots.

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Driving Mechanisms, Motion, and Mechanics of Screw Drive In-Pipe Robots: A Review

Cited by 27 publications

References 46 publications

Mechanical Design and Simulation of a Water Pipes Cleaning Robot

Mechanical Design and Simulation of a Water Pipes Cleaning Robot

Zoomorphic Mobile Robot Development for Vertical Movement Based on the Geometrical Family Caterpillar

Towards long-distance inspection for in-pipe robots in water distribution systems with smart motion facilitated by particle filter and multi-phase motion controller

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