Determining Position and Orientation of a 3-Wheel Robot on a Pipe Using an Accelerometer

Accurate positioning of robots on pipes is a challenge in automated industrial inspection. It is typically achieved using expensive and cumbersome external measurement equipment. This paper presents an Inverse Model method for determining the orientation angle (α) and circumferential position angle (w) of a 3 point of contact robot on a pipe where measurements are taken from a 3-axis accelerometer sensor. The advantage of this system is that it provides absolute positional measurements using only a robot mounted sensor. Two methods are presented which follow an analytical approximation to correct the estimated values. First, a correction factor found though a parametric study between the robot geometry and a given pipe radius, followed by an optimization solution which calculates the desired angles based on the system configuration, robot geometry and the output of a 3-axis accelerometer. The method is experimentally validated using photogrammetry measurements from a Vicon T160 positioning system to record the position of a three point of contact test rig in relation to a test pipe in a global reference frame. An accelerometer is attached to the 3 point of contact test rig which is placed at different orientation (α) and circumferential position (w) angles. This work uses a new method of processing data from an accelerometer sensor to obtain the α and w angles. The experimental results show a maximum error of 3.40° in α and 4.17° in w, where the w circumferential positional error corresponds to ±18mm for the test pipe radius of 253mm.