Design and Development of a Ventilation Pipe Inspection Robot Operating Under Resource-Constrained Conditions

Ventilation pipes are an important way of supplying fresh air to a room. However, there are cases where corrosion and dirt accumulation require inspection of the inside of the pipes. The development of pipeline inspection robots is an effective solution, but for the inspection task of narrow metal ventilation pipes, the existing pipeline robots are limited in size, kinematic capability and perception. In this study, a miniaturised pipeline robot is proposed and developed with a dual articulated arm crawler as the basic kinematic mechanism, which has the ability to cross obstacles, climb slopes and adapt to diameter changes in narrow pipelines. The pipeline robot sensing system is designed in a modular way, using the vanishing point and camera projection model to estimate the position of the robot in a straight metal pipe environment, and analysing the characteristics of the ventilation pipe system to construct a scalable pipeline topology map based on a weighted undirected graph. Finally, a ventilation pipe scene is constructed to conduct experiments on the pipeline robot. The results show that the designed pipeline robot can move flexibly in a narrow metal pipe environment, complete localization within the pipe, and construct pipe maps.