Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : December 06, 2021 - December 07, 2021
For maintenance of pipes in industrial plants and so on, in-pipe microrobots that perform power-needed tasks have been required. We have called this kind of robots the power microrobots and developed them using high density hydraulic power. We have proposed and developed a micropump using fluid inertia as a micro hydraulic power source. The micropump called the FI micropump is a piezoelectric reciprocating pump that has an outlet pipe in place of an outlet check valve and generates high hydraulic power using the fluid inertia effect in the outlet pipe. In this study, a 10 mm diameter in-pipe mobile microrobot using a short length FI micropump was proposed, designed and characterized. The robot has shorter length without space dedicated to retain the working fluid by using the hydraulic microactuators as tanks. The detailed robot structure was proposed. Then, on the basis of the simulated characteristics of the short length FI micropump, the traveling characteristics were theoretically clarified.
