WANG Chen zhong1, WANG Ting1,2, LIU Jun3, ZHANG Zhao long3, HU Shao gang3

（1. School of Mechanical Engineering, Shenyang Ligong University,Shenyang 110159, China;

2. State Key Laboratory of Robotics,Shenyang Institute of Automation,Chinese Academy

of Sciences,Shenyang 110016, China; 3. Anshan Power Supply Company,Liaoning

Electric Power Corporation,Anshan 114000, China）

 

 

Abstract: Aiming at the problems of relative sliding between the robot’s driving wheel and the tube wall and the adaptation of the robot’s body to the pipe diameter, the pipe robot with the characters of autonomous differential motion and adaptive variable diameter was designed by adopting the single motor to drive. The transmission characteristics of the differential mechanism were analyzed, the force equation of working state for the variable diameter mechanism of pipe robot was theoretically deduced, and the mechanical relation between the driving wheels and pipe wall in robots operation was obtained. The movement pose model of robot in pipe was built, and the relationship between each variable in the model under the condition of different pose was studied. The virtual sample models of robot operating in the bend pipe and variable diameter pipe were built respectively. Through the simulation analysis, robots characters of autonomous differential motion and adaptive variable diameter were validated. The results indicate that the pipeline robot can pass through bends without interference, in reducing tube can also effectively realize the independent variable diameter, and show a good driving characteristics.

Key words: differential mechanism; pipe robot; variable diameter mechanism; simulation analysis