Design and Development of a Novel External Pipe Crawling Robot ExPiRo

This paper presents the design approach and development of a novel External Pipeline Robot (EPR) named ExPiRo with the capability of moving on linear segments of cylindrical structures with variable diameters in the range 100 mm to 130 mm. The robot has a passive pipe clutching mechanism created from two parallelogram four-bar linkages. The designed robot can carry payloads up to 2.2 kg. The ExPiRo prototype demonstrated the desired ability to travel on a varying diameter pipe during testing. A control system for position controlling of the robot within the pipeline is also proposed. An ADAMS-MATLAB co-simulation is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed control system. The control system demonstrated significant stability in reaching different goal positions.