Design of an Air-Duct Pipe Inspection and Cleaning Robot

Air-ducts are one of the important elements in a building for making the living environment safe and healthy by ensuring smooth flow of fresh air, often cool air-conditioned, into rooms and spaces inside buildings. Often, over time, the air-ducts and vents can be unclean with dusts, dirt and contaminants. This can affect the performance and efficiency of the heat, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system, and more importantly the people’s health. Manual cleaning of the air duct usually very challenging, tedious and time consuming. Considering these conditions, an in-pipe robot that can move along air-duct piping to carry out inspection and cleaning work is designed. This paper describes the design process that was carried out, started out with developing the design requirements and intended functions of the robot. A 3D model was developed using Creo software and stress analysis were conducted. The final design of the robot was produced, utilizing Arduino Uno as the main microcontroller, eight servomotors for the actuators and multiple pressure sensors are used to assist in the navigation and motion.