Pipe Inspection Robot for Improving Security and Efficiency in Industrial Plants.

– The engineer is constantly conformed with the challenges of bringing ideas and design into reality. New machines and techniques are being developed continuously to manufacture various products at cheaper rates and high quality. The pipe inspection robot with active pipe-diameter adaptability and automatic tractive force adjusting is developed for long-distance inspection of main gas pipelines with different diameter series. Its physical design employs the scheme that three sets of tri wheeled leg mechanism are circumferentially spaced out 120° apart symmetrically. This structural design makes it possible to realize the adaptation to pipe diameter and tractive force adjusting together. On the basis of analyzing the mechanical actions of the adaptation to pipe diameter and tractive force adjusting, the related mechanical models are established, and their control system structure and control strategy are discussed. To verify the pipe-diameter adaptability and tractive force adjusting of the robot, related field experiments are implemented in actual underground gas pipeline. The experimental results show that the theoretical analysis in this paper is valid and the prototype of this robot can work well in actual underground gas pipelines. Compared with other similar robots, this robot, which employs active mode for its adaptability to pipe diameter, can be adaptable to the wide range of gas pipeline diameters from ∅300 mm to ∅500 mm and automatically provide a stable and reliable tractive force with strong capacity of tractive force adjusting. As a mobile carrier for visual inspection wireless camera is mounted to see corrosion, crack, defect, and holes of main gas pipelines, spring is also mounted in middle for making it flexible to take turn