Motion design of a pipe cleaning snake robot with a long brush

We present a snake robot that has a long brush and a movement of the robot to clean the entire inner pipe walls. The snake robot is composed of two parts; the cleaning part which touches the long brush to the pipe wall and the pulling part which pulls the brush while generating slips. The two parts are connected by a passive roll joint and the two parts are twisted at different velocities respectively. In order to clean the entire pipe wall, we estimate a condition in which uncleaned areas are most likely to occur through preliminary experiments and adjust the rolling velocities of the cleaning part and the pulling part so that the brush cleans the entire pipe wall. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified by simulations and experiments using the robot. We confirmed that the robot moved while slipping in the pipe axis direction and the robot cleaned the pipe wall at a high cleaning rate.