Design and research on variable-diametered pipeline robots

After analyzing the current development status of the pipeline robot at home and abroad, since the pipeline robot has to adapt variable-diametered pipelines, the overall scheme of a dual-crawler variable-diametered pipeline robot was proposed. Key components of the robot such as the drive and the diameter regulating mechanism as well as the control system of the robot were designed. The control system included master computer and slave computer with manual control mode and automatic control mode, thus the robot could realize stepless speed control, moving forward and backward, steering and image collection etc. The research results laid foundations for practical development of the variable-diametered pipeline robot.