Review of Inner Pipe Grinding Robots

Pipes are typically joined together by welding. Convex beads are generated inside the pipes. Removing weld beads inside the pipes protects them from damage and prolongs their lifespan. Manual grinding will create high concentration of dust which is harmful to human operators. What's more, some pipes are too small for human operators to access. Therefore, grinding inside a pipe is unfriendly to manual ways. Thus, different inner pipe grinding robots are invented to solve this problem. This paper reviews these inner pipe grinding robots. Based on different crawling techniques of inner pipe grinding robots, we categorize them into vehicle-type, worm-type, screw-type and wheel-type robots. Each type of robot has its advantages and disadvantages. We summarize them and give future trends of the inner pipe grinding robots.