Design, Development and Fabrication of In-pipe Inspection and Cleaning Robot

Abstract

Pipelines are extensively used in industries, such as power plant, chemical industries and oil and gas industries for transportation of raw materials like gases, crude oil, petroleum and industrial waste. Due to regular usage of pipelines, they may get damaged and it decreases the mass flow rate and efficiency of the pipelines. Because of the above reasons, it is mandatory to monitor and clean the pipelines regularly. The proposed model is a semiautomated in-pipe robot to do inspection and cleaning tasks effectively. This in-pipe robot can adjust to varying size of the pipelines within a range to move inside the pipelines. The piston and cylinder arrangement connected with a spring is the mechanism of this developed in-pipe robot. In this model DC motors are used for locomotion and cleaning of the robot in the pipelines. The vision sensor/ camera is used to do inspection task in the pipelines.