Development of Inpipe Inspection Robot System

Abstract

Recently, various inpipe inspection robots are developed and its effective values are increased in industrial use. However, it is so difficult to make a inpipe inspection robot system which has flexible mobility and accuracy of inspection in pipelines. Especially, it is very important to know the exact crack position. In this paper, we are to present a lately developed inpipe inspection robot system which can resolve the above Problems. The robot is configured as an articulated structure like a snake. Two active driving vehicles are located in front and rear of the inspection robot respectively and passive modules such as a nondestructive testing module and a control module are chained between the active vehicles. Special feature of the robot system is a ground interface, which is able to show informations of robot and pipelines. By using this, so called virtual map in this paper, user is able to know the pipelines'feature and crack position.