Climbing pipes with robo-worm
Print Edition
A white piece of equipment “climbs” along a round tube. Its body stretching and contracting like an inchworm, it moves forward smoothly and even passes a 90-degree angle.
The equipment is a one-piece 3D-printed pipe-climbing robot composed of sequenced novel soft bending mechanisms, which was recently developed by professor Zuo Siyang and Dr. Liu Jianbin’s research team at Tianjin University in north China’s Tianjin Municipality.
Although pipe-climbing robots have been used in real-time monitoring, leak inspection and other tasks, no single device could climb on both the inner and outer walls of a pipe.
And such robots are usually designed for specific applications with complex structures, limiting their adaptability. They are also relatively heavy.
The new design by the team of Tianjin University answers the challenges. It is composed of an upper gripper, a middle section and a lower gripper, as well as three intake pipes at the back of the robot to control the three parts.
“To trigger a ‘climbing’ motion, we only need to alternately pressurize and depressurize the device’s grippers, and the motion is under our direct control,” said Liu. The middle section elongates like an inchworm when it is pressurized and is reinstated when depressurized.
The 3D-printed soft bending mechanism uses the small strain of a non-tensile material to allow for large bending and can rotate around longitudinal or lateral directions.
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