Mechanical Design and Dynamic Analysis of Pipe Crawling Robot for Internal Gas Pipeline Inspection

Pipelines play an important role in terms of transporting various types of fluid like liquid and gas. They are mainly used not only in small applications like housing area, but also in large industrial field like in an oil and gas field. Maintenance of these pipelines is crucial and the cost of doing it continues to increase from time to time and thus a new approach is needed in order to tackle these problems. This project report presents the design and development of crawling robots for internal pipe inspection. There are four designs being considered but this paper will present the simplest of the design which is the wheeled type design that with a pantograph mechanism with a sliding base that allows folding and unfolding of the robot’s legs. The mechanism of this robot is based on the design of MRINSPECT III and the driving mechanism of MRINSPECT IV. The robot is designed accordingly so that it can function through a pipeline ranging from 6 inches diameter to 10 inches diameter. The design is then modeled and simulated using AutoCAD and ADAMS respectively.