Design of a pipeline inspection robot with belt driven ridged cone shaped skate model

This paper presents a pipeline inspection robot with a linkage mechanical clutch, which consists a novel belt driven ridged cone shaped skate model that can be used to conquest irregular environmental barriers. The mechanical clutch is a 3-bar linkage mechanism. The robot is designed to be conformal to the environment: each chain being in touch with the walls of pipeline or tunnel. Thus, the robot can be operated in various configurations and sizes of pipeline, and can utilize the belt driven corrugate-ridged cone shaped skate model to advance in irregular barriers of pipeline. The prototype of the robot system has been developed, and experiments were carried out to verify the validity of the proposed design.