Development of a Pipe Inspection Robot

A new pipe inspection robot with GUI control panel, called NTU-Navigator, is developed in this paper. The NTU-Navigator is light-weight, modular, easy to manipulate and easy to repair. The robot can be easily controlled by using the GUI on PC. The modular design concept is also used in designing this robot. It can be divided into four modules and each module has its independent control circuit. The steering method of the robot inside the U-shapes pipe is developed on the basis of fuzzy set theory. Different parameters are used as the input variables and the steering angle is the output variable. The inference engine consists of three modes. Under various modes, the deflection of the robot inside the pipe can be examined from the simulation program.