Development and controller design of wheeled-type pipe inspection robot

A wheeled-type pipe inspection robot designed to work in 300 to 500 mm diameter pipe with multiple elbows is introduced in this paper. The robot consists of two modules-active module and passive module. Each module has three wheel configurations with different mechanism to expand the wheels. A proportional integral derivative controller is designed for the robot to follow reference linear velocity and reference angular velocity. Simulations and experiments are conducted to verify performances of the proposed controlled robot. The results demonstrate that the robot with the designed controller can work well by following the reference velocity.