Development of an In-pipe Mobile Robot for Inspecting Clefts of Pipes

In order to detect out the clefts of pipes automatically, an in-pipe mobile robot is developed. This robot is designed with six wheel-type legs to make sure it can move smoothly in both horizontal and vertical directions. Meanwhile, it can also turn at cross places like T-type route. The length of legs can be adjusted so that the robot can be applied to different sizes of pipes. The camera system is used to obtain the images of pipes and detect the clefts by edge detections. The whole robot is controlled by the micro-processor called Raspberry Pi. The effectiveness of this robot is proven by detecting different sizes of clefts in different kinds of pipes in the experiments.