Autonomous mobile robot in pipe for piping operations

An autonomous mobile robot that can move autonomously in a horizontal pipe, a vertical pipe and an elbow joint with bending angle of 90/spl deg/. Furthermore, the robot has a vision sensor and an operating arm in front of the robot body, and accordingly it has functions to execute piping operations, such as inspection of pipe surface, welding of the pipes and so on. The robot is constructed by several units with four wheels connected by universal joints each other. The robot is controlled by a host personal computer and one-chip microcomputers. As the results of operating experiments, the effectiveness of the robot system in autonomous movement in a pipe and an elbow joint and automatic tracking of a welding line was confirmed.