Design and Development of a Novel Bio-inspired Worm-type Soft Robot for In-pipe Locomotion

摘要

The following paper presents the concept of an earthworm like soft robot for pipe crawling for the inspection of tubes and its design, development, and fabrication process. The soft robot was designed to help in preventing accidents in the industry caused due to faulty pipelines as conventional robots are unable to move through pipes efficiently. The proposed design employs a combination of two radial and one linear actuator fabricated using Ecoflex 00-30 to execute its worm-type locomotion. The radial actuators grip the walls of the pipe while the linear actuator traverses the robot forward. The robot, measuring 240mm in length and 68mm in diameter, was simulated for the expected results and tested in an experimental setup. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the blocked force and radial displacement of the radial actuator, and the linear displacement of the linear actuator against the pressure applied. The experimentation shows that the blocked force is sufficient to grip the tube preventing slip while a significant variation in radial displacement is observed at moderate pressures. The experiments conclude that the optimal usage parameters of the robot is an optimal operating pressure of 20kPa with a speed of 14.4 mm/s.