Design and performance analysis of fast crawling soft pipeline robot
Soft pipeline robots with anchoring-telescoping motion mechanism are typically constructed from flexible materials such as silicone and hydrogel,which can realize anchoring and telescoping in the pipeline through the deformation of flexible materials and have good flexibility.However,due to the viscoelasticity and hysteresis of flexible materials,the soft pipeline robot usually exhibits small force and slow response speed,which is difficult to store and release a large amount of mechanical energy quickly,and the crawling speed is slow.In order to solve this problem,a soft pipeline robot that can realize fast crawling is designed.This robot was composed of an anchoring module and a telescoping module.The anchoring module employed flexural deformation of the flexible belt to achieve the anchoring in the pipeline,while the telescoping module utilized the soft continuum structure with tower springs as main part to facilitate extension and contraction.According to the experimental measurement,the maximum crawling speed of the robot in the pipeline was 102 mm/s and the maximum anchoring force was 76.4 N.The robot was capable of stable crawling in pipelines with inner diameter of 90-120 mm,and had good adaptability to different shapes of unstructured pipeline environment.The results demonstrate that the designed robot can not only achieve bidirectional crawling in horizontal and vertical pipelines,but also quickly pass through S-shaped pipelines,which can provide new ideas for the design and research of soft robots in unstructured pipelines.
万方数据
维普
