Design and motion planning of a two-moduled indoor pipeline inspection robot

Author

Kwon, Young-Sik ; Lim, Hoon ; Jung, Eui-Jung ; Yi, Byung-Ju

Author_Institution

Sch. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Hanyang Univ., Seoul

fYear

2008

fDate

19-23 May 2008

Firstpage

3998

Lastpage

4004

Abstract

This paper deals with design and motion planning of a reconfigurable robot that can be used for inspection of 80-100 mm pipelines. This robot consists of two connecting modules and each module consists of three pairs of caterpillar, which is operated by micro DC motor. The robot is foldable by using an embedded four-bar mechanism and compression of a spring connected to the four-bar allows the robot to maintain contact with the wall of pipelines. Controlling the speed of each caterpillar independently provides a steering capability to go through elbow and T-branch. The robot system has been developed and the validity of this mechanism was proved by experimentation.

Keywords

DC motors; micromotors; mobile robots; path planning; service robots; steering systems; velocity control; caterpillar; embedded four-bar mechanism; micro DC motor; motion planning; reconfigurable robot; steering capability; two-moduled indoor pipeline inspection robot; Computer science; Couplings; Elbow; Inspection; Mobile robots; Motion planning; Pipelines; Robotics and automation; Springs; Wheels;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Robotics and Automation, 2008. ICRA 2008. IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Pasadena, CA

ISSN

1050-4729

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-1646-2

Electronic_ISBN

1050-4729

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ROBOT.2008.4543825

Filename

4543825