Research On Micro Pipeline Robot System

With the rapid development of modern industry and the practical needs of daily life, there are equipped with a large number of pipe systems in every corner of the city and factories. Especially in recent decades, pipeline which is using as important material transportation facilities has been more widely used, as bringing people lives with great convenience and high production efficiency. With the growth of the pipeline usage, there needs regular testing and maintenance. But a large number of pipeline systems are installed with space limitations or special environmental requirements, so the operator can not directly reaches the pipeline for testing and maintenance. For such pipelines, the traditional testing and maintenance methods result in a tremendous waste of resources.Under this situation, pipeline robot testing and maintenance instead of manual operation can save a lot of pipeline maintenance and management costs and reduces material waste, which has practical significance and practical value to society.Compared to the traditional pipeline robot, this paper proposes a new structure, breaking the tradition of the small pipe robot requires of small drive. This paper separates the drive unit from the functional unit, and installs the external drive unit out of the pipeline, and the two parts are connected by springs together. This structure can choose the large size driving motor beyond the pipe diameter size limitation, so it can improve the efficiency of the robot.This paper does research on the four different sections of the pipeline robot system features, including pipeline robot motion principle, turn through performance, tube barrier through performance and adaptive pipeline structure.1. Under the system control, motor make the spring produced spiral feed motion, then drives the robot body functional units which is connected to the end of the spring into the pipeline. When the control system reverse driven movement, then the spring will bring out the robot body function unit out of the pipeline.2. This paper do the research on the robot unit turn passing performance from the size of constraints, walking round the trajectory equation and motion analysis three different points, and have gotten the pipeline robot body size constraints condition, pipe robot trajectory equations and the balance equation, and all these provide a theoretical basis for the structural design of pipeline robot.3. Analyses the robot over the obstacle features by building a mechanical model of the robot through the obstacle pipe, eventually get the conditions of equations between the stiffness coefficient k and the distance x.4. Compared with the normal adaptive structure of robot working principle and application field, and analyzes their advantages and disadvantages, and considering the premise of the robot design, so finally decided to use the spring lift structure.Using ADAMS kinematics simulation software establishes the virtual prototype simplified of pipeline robot functional unit and pipeline model to analysis some features of the robot system.1. By measuring various changes and force changes of spring of the walking wheels to decide the best combination parameters of simplified virtual robot functional unit prototype model and the pipe model comes to the conclusion that when the profile parameterψ=90°, the robot has the best turn passing performance.2. Through three different levels of variable diameter pipeline simulation, robot cell body can be recognized within the smooth movement in the pipe; 3. Robot cell body over the obstacle simulation verify the robot cell body has the ability to climb over obstacles in a certain thickness and reduces the stiffness of the spring can enhance the ability.Meanwhile, this paper has done the structure design of the pipeline robot and assembly and commissioning. According to control system functional requirements, this paper make the three functions into two separate processing, which robot visual function as an independent part, and the robot drive motor control and position real-time feedback as another part of the independent system, and ultimately integrated these two components together into control system software. Under the Windows environment, using Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0, integrated the three functions in a single window interface, including visual monitoring, drive motor control and position real-time feedback of the robot in the pipe.This paper does much research and analysis on the Pipeline Robot system, and design and develop the Pipeline Robot prototype system which is meet the requirements.