Proposal of a Peristaltic Motion Type Duct Cleaning Robot for Traveling in a Flexible Pipe

The cleaning of residential ventilation ducts is necessary to prevent damage to health. However, since residential ventilation ducts are usually thin and curved, cleaning them is difficult. It is also difficult to obtain thrust within the duct using a wheel or a snake type robot because it is hard to obtain an appropriate reaction force in a deformed pipe. Therefore, the pipe must be gripped stably even if it is flexible so that thrust can be generated to run the cleaning robot through the pipe. In this paper, we modeled a cleaning robot that uses peristaltic motion running through a flexible duct with an inner diameter of 50 mm. Then, the validity of the model was verified by experiment. Finally, a cleaning experiment was conducted and the cleaning rate was 98.7 %.