A pipeline inspection micro robot based on screw motion wheels

The micro robot based on screw motion wheels, which features high payload/mass ratio, fast and continuous motion, adaptation to pipe diameter or roundness variations, is suitable for locomotion and inspection inside small-diameter pipelines. The robot inspection system, Tubot I, developed at Shanghai University is composed of locomotion mechanism with an inner motor, a micro CCD camera and a monitor outside the pipeline. In the paper, the kinematics and statics analyses are presented for the screw locomotion system of Tubot I. The moving characteristics are obtained from experiments on the robot prototype.