The Piezo Impact Drive Mechanism Applies To Robotic Inspection Of Small Pipes:Modeling And Optimal Design

Pipes inspection is a very important task in industry. This thesis presents a study for robotic inspection of pipes in the context of industrial application. There have been many works on this topic, but there is still some gap away from industrial application. The main problems are:(1) the loading capacity of the robot (insufficient high with the current robot systems for pipes inspection),(2) the crawling speed of the robot (insufficient fast), and (3) the robustness to the pipes due to different sizes, textures of the inner surface and so on). This thesis is focused on addressing the first two problems.The main idea of the study presented in this thesis was to make use of an actuation principle called "inertial-friction" principle to allow the robot to move autonomously and to make use of another principle called "piezoelectric effect" to increase the loading capacity. The study further combined these two principles to develop an autonomous robotic system for pipes inspection.The specific objectives of the study were:(1) to develop a model for the dynamics of the whole robot based on the piezoelectric friction inertia principle with a particular attention to include the mass of the piezoelectric actuator,(2) to optimize the design of the system to tailor its application to the pipes inspection, and (3) to build a test-bed to validate the model and optimal design.The result of the study can conclude:(1) it is significant to include the mass of piezoelectric actuator in the model to provide a more accurate prediction and simulation, and (2) the input voltage together with the masses of the system is an important variable to optimize the performance of the robot.The contribution of the current study is that it provides the new knowledge to the field of robotic inspection of pipes in particular to the piezoelectric friction inertia robotic system. This new knowledge includes the model that includes the mass of the piezoelectric actuator and the significant effect of the parameters of the masses of the system and input voltage.