Underactuated in-Pipe Robot for Moving inside Underground Oil Pipelines

Composed of tri-axis differential mechanism and adjustable flexible pipe-diameter adaptability mechanism, an underactuated wheeled in-pipe robot is developed to avoid the motion interference during moving in elbow. The experiment system is established to evaluate the robotic differential performance. The experimental results show that the proposed robot has several advantages such as reliable differential performance and pipe-diameter adaptability, and hence verify that the present underactuated method is an effective way how to prevent a wheeled in-pipe robot from motion interference.