Design And Realization Of Peristaltic Soft Pipe Robot

Traditional pipeline robots are generally made of rigid materials,due to the poor adaptability of the rigid structure onto the environment,robots struggle to work in rugged and complex pipeline environments,and the rigid material is in contact with the pipeline,which will easily cause damage to the pipeline contact surface and aggravate the damage to the pipeline.Soft pipe robots are made of soft materials that can deform greatly,theoretically has unlimited degrees of freedom and strong compliance,it can adapt to various complicated pipeline environments without causing damage to the pipeline.Therefore,it has extensive application prospects in pipeline detection and cleaning.Aiming at the problems of the existing peristaltic software pipeline robots with a single motion mode and insufficient adaptability to pipe diameter changes,this paper proposes a peristaltic software pipeline robot with multiple motion modes.The robot consists of a pneumatic software driver,in different pipe diameters,different motion modes can be used to run,and crawling on a plane is also possible.Main contents studied in this article include:(1)Crawling mechanism of Inchworm larva and earthworm was studied and analyzed,and combined with the size and structural characteristics of the pipeline,movement mode of the peristaltic soft pipe robot is determined,and the structure of the robot is designed.(2)Finite element simulation software is used to establish the analysis model of each software driver,influence of the structure and size of the soft drive on its deformation performance is analyzed,relationship between the driving air pressure of each driver and its deformation degree is analyzed.According to the simulation results,the structure and size of the software driver are improved.(3)Casting mold of the peristaltic soft pipe robot is designed and manufactured,and the robot body is completed,actuators of the peristaltic soft pipe robot are studied experimentally.Experimental results show that the displacement of each actuator can meet the requirements of different motion modes of the robot.Under the same driving pressure,the experimental results are consistent with the simulation results.(4)movement control platform of the peristaltic soft pipe robot is built,which realizesthe real-time control of the robot movement.Experiments of pipeline straight running and climbing of the peristaltic soft pipe robot under the motion mode of imitating the ruler,wok and earthworm were completed,In addition,the experiment of plane creeping in the wok like motion mode was completed.The results show that: the peristaltic soft pipe robot runs in the pipe in imitation scale-type motion mode at a speed of 5.50 mm / s and the climbing angle is12°;The running speed of the earthworm-like movement mode is5.65 mm / s,and the climbing angle is15°;The plane creeping speed in the pan like motion mode is 5.35 mm / s.The experimental results show that the peristaltic soft pipe robot meets the design requirements.