Optimal Piping Robot Design for Inner Pipe Operations

Piping robots that work inside pipes are widely used in nuclear, oil and gas industries. These robots can perform inner pipe operations such as in-spection, cleaning and grinding inside pipes. No matter what the operation is, the ability to move smoothly inside a pipe is very important. Pipes always have joints, turns and elbows that constrain the dimensionality of piping robots. In this paper, we present an optimization method to optimize the dimensionality of piping robots. Once the pipe's parameters are known, an optimization method is formulated to maximize the volume of a piping robot to ensure enough space for powerful actuators to perform different tasks. The proposed method is validated by fabricating a piping robot based on the optimized parameters for a given pipe. Experiments were performed and the results show that the robot can move smoothly inside the pipe.