Research Of The Mechanical System Of Vertical Pipe Robot To Suit Multi-radius Pipe

With the development of computer and robot technology, the requirement for robots’ performance is higher and higher. Instead of being limited to be used in the early period of industry automation, the modern robots are widely used in more fields such as the military application, civilian application, and science etc. As a special type of robot, pipe robot is commonly used in engineering pipes of petroleum industry, chemical industry, nuclear industry, city construction, etc, for examination, exploration, failure diagnose, cleaning, spouting, jointing, pipe fixing, and so on. The system of pipe robot includes mobile mechanism and work mechanism. The mobile mechanism keeps the robot reach the destination easily, while work mechanism accomplish the function steadily.So far, most of developed pipe robot mobile mechanisms can’t adapt vertical pipe. A few pipe robot can adapt the vertical pipe, but these mechanisms can only be used for static pipe radius situation. They barely have mobile abilities for multi-radius pipe and vertical pipe. They don’t have the adaptability for unstructured pipe environment, which effects their capacity and efficiency. Therefore, unstructured pipe environment pipe robot is a focused research project worldwide.According to disadvantages of existed pipe robot mobile mechanisms, Donghua University invented a vertical pipe robot mobile mechanism, which possesses of own intellectual property. The pipe robot include chassis mechanism with four track feet and supporting mechanism with one track feet. It has excellent in-pipe negotiating ability. It can track through vertical pipe in the range of 200-350mm in the rectangle shape pipe and in the range ofΦ250-Φ350 in the circular shape pipe. When walking inside a changing diameters pipe, it’ll auto adjust the relative position of its tracks.The author systematically overviews the developing situation of various types of the pipe robot at home and abroad, and put forward the structure scheme which adopts the vertical pipe robot to suit multi-radius pipe. According to the different problems vertical pipe robot faced, three different supporting mechanism are presented and compared in the thesis. And the dissertation has done theoretical analyses and experimental argumentations to the pipe robot mechanical system, especially the robot’s core technologies, such as steering resistance, adaptability of arced siphon, self-adaptability to pipe radius etc.Based on the study of the above mentioned key technology of pipe robot, a vertical pipe robot system was created and a lot of testing experiments were carried out. It shows the workability of the system and reached the expected goal.