A Novel Pipeline Inspection Robot with Two Angle-Changeable Crawler Drive Modules

To satisfy the requirement of traversing through variable diameter pipelines, this paper designs and implements a novel pipeline inspection robot with pipeline-diameter adaptive mechanism. The pipeline-diameter adaptive mechanism is equipped with two independent crawler drive units which are configured symmetrically with robot body. Combining with the crawler drive module (link2), linkl, link3, link4 and base of the robot, a five-bar mechanism is constructed, and can adapt to the different pipeline-diameter by changing the position and attitude of the two crawler drive modules. The mathematics model of the pipeline-diameter adaptive mechanism is established. Furthermore, the kinematics of crawler wheels in the wall of pipeline is discussed. A pipeline inspection robot prototype is developed to verify the validity and feasibility. The results show that the proposed robot can traverse in the pipelines with diameters more than 400mm, and the velocity can be up to 0.4m/s.