Development of pipe inspection robot using ring-type laser

This paper describes the robot capable of inspecting a pipe. The developed robot is composed of three bodies, six legs, a laser range finder, a ring-type laser, and a CCD camera. The six legs are composed of three worm gears that are arranged at an angle of 120 degrees to run inside pipes of different diameters. The robot is designed with two joints to change the direction in pipe junctions, and the robot can measure a fore pipe shape using the laser range finder. The ring-type laser and the CCD camera are installed in the front the robot to detect and evaluate defects of a pipe. The CCD camera takes an image of the ring-type laser light in a pipe, and defects in a pipe are detected and evaluated from a break of the ring-type light by the image processing. We verified the effectiveness of the robot through the movement experiment and the defect inspection experiment.